The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “We had a deal, Zina.”

  She had turned pale. She took his pen and pad with trembling hands and wrote.

  Тремсин

  Jacob said, “English?”

  She hesitated, then added Tremsin.

  “That’s good,” he said. “That’s his last name?”

  Nod.

  “First name?”

  She scrawled.

  Arkady.

  “Arkady Tremsin.”

  A violent tremor ran through her.

  “All right,” he said. “Now tell me what happened.”

  “I told you, I was not there.”

  “You must have seen something or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Zina glanced at Katie in the unmarked’s rear window. “Night, I am cleaning oven. There is knock. ‘Go away, we are closed.’ Knocking, knocking. I go out, man is there.”

  “Tremsin.”

  She shuddered. “Another.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “What does Tremsin have to do with it, then?”

  “He works for him.”

  “You know that because . . .”

  “People say.”

  “Which people?”

  “No one,” she said. “Everyone. It’s ten years ago.”

  “So you let this other guy in.”

  “He was not asking permission.”

  “Why did he come to you?”

  She said, “He was coming few times before. To buy food.” A tart smile. “He says he is here with his boss, on vacation. His boss says I make vatrushki like home.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “He told me, ‘Go home.’ I went.”

  “Did he give you anything? Money?”

  Zina bit her lip. “No.”

  He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t want to shut her down. “Okay. Go on.”

  “In morning I come to work, there are many police cars.”

  “He used one of your garbage cans,” Jacob said. “To prop the mother’s body.”

  “I never saw nothing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the cops about him?”

  She stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She shook her head. She had begun to withdraw.

  “Did he kill them inside the bakery?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was there blood?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What did—”

  “No more,” she said.

  He started to press, but her face had hardened and she was looking toward the unmarked. She said, “I can’t save her always.”

  He’d hit the limit. “All right,” he said. “I’ll give her to you.”

  “She won’t like this,” Zinaida Moskvina said. “She will like you better.”

  • • •

  BACK HOME, he opened the laptop, the bourbon he’d earlier denied himself tucked between two couch cushions. It was two-thirty in the morning.

  He typed in Arkady Tremsin.

  The sheer number of hits gave him a sense of the scale of Zina’s fear.

  Arkady Lavrentyevich Tremsin, age sixty-three, founder of Metallurgy TechAnsch ZAO, one of Russia’s largest refineries. Wikipedia, citing Forbes, put his net worth at $850 million.

  Three years ago, he had abruptly resigned and moved to Paris. The reason for his departure was subject to enthusiastic conjecture, everything from a sex scandal to financial hanky-panky. He’d kept a low profile ever since, shunning public appearances and giving no interviews. The past spring, the Russian government had frozen his assets and seized a controlling share of TechAnsch, citing failure to pay tax. Lawsuits were ongoing.

  However much money he’d left behind, the presumption was he had hidden plenty more in offshore accounts—enough to ride out exile in luxury.

  Image search returned a pinkish man with melting features. It was not so much that he was fat, but that he lacked foundations; the underlying structures were sunken, resulting in a flat, indistinct mien. More recent photos were pixelated, long-lens shots of a white head, surrounded by bodyguards, as it ducked into a limousine.

  Susan Lomax might be able to positively ID him. In the meantime, Jacob reviewed the notes from their conversation.

  Big and tall; ugly black ring.

  Nestled amid the shoulders and elbows and marble faces, Tremsin was about the same height as his bodyguards. No shots of his hands, but no big deal. Appearances changed. In the end, it was his pattern of behavior that carried the most weight.

  Jacob began excavating the past.

  • • •

  THE GUY WAS NOWHERE, and then everywhere, and then nowhere again.

  Prior to 2002, he seemed not to exist. Then his name began popping up on finance blogs and in industrial trade journals, most of them in Russian. Jacob hobbled along, leaning on translation websites, e-mailing Mallick to request an interpreter ASAP.

  The mother lode came in the form of a fifteen-thousand-word profile, originally published in Novaya Gazeta in 2006, later serialized by the British Financial Times.

  It opened with a description of the flat Tremsin had grown up in, twenty-eight square meters in Moscow’s Kapotnya District, overlooking the mammoth oil refinery where his father worked. As a child, he had suffered lung problems and for a period was confined to bed. His mother left a bookkeeping job to care for him full-time, enforcing a grueling regimen of calisthenics and rote memorization, so that little Arkasha returned to school physically robust and three years ahead of his peers.

  The arrangement of the murder scene rose up in Jacob’s mind.

  Mother and son, in wide-eyed concentration; a lesson in progress.

  What kind of pressure pushed a child that far out in front of the pack?

  The author of the piece, Natalia Honcharenko, struggled to contain her distaste for her subject, writing in a tone that periodically flared from cynicism into outright paranoia. An inevitable flaw, Jacob thought, of a culture so long lied to.

  At some point, though, even she had to cop to Tremsin’s brilliance. His former instructors at Moscow State University recalled him with awe. At twenty-three, he’d earned a first-level doctorate in applied chemistry, an unheard-of feat.

  Jacob examined the inset photo.

  Kandidat Tremsin wore mutton chops and boxy eyeglasses.

  In 1975, he moved to Leningrad, ostensibly to take up a teaching position. Honcharenko claimed otherwise, citing an anonymous source who put Tremsin at the 401st KGB school. It was there, she wrote, that he had met and befriended the man who would later enable his vault to the top of the food chain.

  Dr. Tremsin and President Putin found multiple points of common ground. Both men enjoyed the outdoors, and colleagues remember them as frequent walking companions in the Alexander Gardens. Sometimes these walks would turn into contests of strength—races, or wrestling matches.

  “They had a bit of a rivalry,” says a former classmate, speaking anonymously.

  “Most of the time it was good-natured. You must remember that the KGB is a very competitive place, attracting the most competitive people and encouraging that trait.”

  Asked which man was the dominant personality, the classmate says, “I would say it’s a matter of perspective. Putin gave the orders, he gave orders to everyone. At the same time, Arkasha could get under his skin in a way that nobody else could.”

  One incident stands out as exemplary.

  “It must have been late January,” the classmate continues. “The Neva was frozen solid, and the boys were talking about getting together to cut holes in the ice and take a swim.

  “Putin declined, giving the excuse that he had gone the previous week. As he said
this, Tremsin got a mischievous look on his face. He said, ‘But, Vladimir Vladimirovich, when did you go? I was with you Sunday, we had work the rest of the days. Maybe you meant the week before? But that can’t be, that was New Year . . . Did you go at night? No, that isn’t possible, you’d never be so foolish, you could have an accident and nobody would be there to pull you out . . . So when did you go?’

  “Putin turned a frightful color. He said nothing, but we could see how furious he was.

  “The next day, Tremsin shows up with his arm in a sling, a bruise on his face. He could not stop laughing about it.

  “This sort of thing happened on several occasions. The funny thing was, it didn’t seem to harm their relationship. Soon enough Putin would be laughing, too. Not many people could make him laugh.”

  Indeed, this talent would stand Tremsin in good stead in years to come . . .

  Starting in 1977, he went to work for Norilsk, the Soviet government’s gigantic nickel concern. His official title was research scientist; he was the principal author on dozens of papers, coauthor of dozens more. In 1978 he earned a second-level doctorate, becoming a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and receiving a civilian medal for “contributions to the development of techniques leading to greater efficiency in the electrolytic refinement of copper.”

  Honcharenko dismissed the Norilsk job as a cover. His real work, she alleged, took place at Laboratory 12, the KGB’s division for poisons and chemical weapons.

  As before, her proof was thin. A handful of KGB files had been opened to the public, but most remained classified.

  One indication of Tremsin’s special status lay in his freedom of movement, far greater than that of the average Soviet citizen. His name turned up on the rosters of chemistry conferences across the globe; he’d spent academic year 1978–79 in Paris, lecturing at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, as part of a Franco-Soviet exchange program.

  A brief marriage produced no children and ended in divorce. Lingering acrimony prompted his ex-wife, who worked at the Ministry of Information and Press, to denounce him as a homosexual—a crime punishable by up to five years’ hard labor.

  Somehow, Tremsin avoided this more serious fate. In April 1981, he was dismissed from his post at Norilsk, and within the week had left Moscow for Prague.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jacob stared at the screen, which seemed to be molting, letters falling like scales.

  She went to Prague.

  She was never the same after that.

  He shifted the laptop to the table, killed the bourbon, headed to the kitchen. Along the way, the empty slipped from his grasp, thudding to the carpet.

  Uncapping a fresh bottle, he took slow, steady drafts until the liquor hovered waist-high in the bottle. He set it on the counter and returned to the sofa.

  The screen saver had kicked in, LAPD shield bouncing from corner to corner. He touched the space bar and the text reappeared like a slap.

  Honcharenko could locate no official record of Tremsin’s activities in Czechoslovakia. She had, however, managed to track down a requisition form bearing his signature, from a Prague psychiatric hospital called Bohnice. A former nurse at the facility—speaking on condition of anonymity, like every other source—named him as the head of the inpatient ward, starting in the spring of 1981.

  When I asked how Dr. Tremsin, a Russian chemist with no formal medical education, had come to occupy a position of authority at a Czechoslovakian hospital, the nurse laughed.

  “His qualifications were irrelevant. He was brought in for one purpose alone: to tighten the taps.”

  I asked what she meant by that. She explained that the previous director had released a patient of whom he was unduly fond.

  “As it turned out, he had been duped. The patient was KGB, a vlaštovka, and after she got out, she proceeded to defect. The administration was humiliated. Moscow was furious. They blamed the Czechs and demanded action. They sacked the old staff and replaced them with their own people. I survived the purge only because I spoke Russian well. They needed at least a few people who could communicate with the patients.”

  Perhaps the nurse was scared, or else she had things on her conscience that didn’t sit well: she declined to detail Tremsin’s work on the ward, leaving Honcharenko to indulge in more suggestive speculation.

  Whatever project occupied Dr. Tremsin’s time in Czechoslovakia, it seems he attained enough success to make him valuable to Moscow once again. In January 1983, he was reinstated at Norilsk, where he became involved with

  Jacob went back.

  Eighty-one through eighty-three.

  Overlapping Bina’s visit.

  She was never the same after that.

  • • •

  THE REMAINDER OF THE ARTICLE covered the periods pre– and post–Berlin Wall; Tremsin’s patient accumulation of friends and resources; the rise of the first wave of oligarchs under Yeltsin and their dismantling at Putin’s hands. Between 1999 and 2004, the list of Russia’s richest men turned over completely, leaving Tremsin bobbing comfortably in the middle of the pack.

  All the same, he maintained a relatively modest lifestyle. It was chemistry that Tremsin loved; the fact that his passion happened to generate reams of cash was immaterial. Honcharenko played up the contrast between his childhood home and his current residence, a seven-bedroom flat on Moscow’s Ostozhenka Street that sat unoccupied most months. Typically, Tremsin preferred to stay at his dacha, driving distance to the TechAnsch campus in Shchyolkovo. Foremen cited him as a frequent visitor to the refinery floor.

  Jacob had a hard time seeing him as the driver of a Gerhardt Falke S.

  Maybe he’d brought it to a friend’s house for dinner, in lieu of wine.

  Please enjoy these eleven hundred horsepower as a token of my gratitude.

  Published several years before his fall from grace, the article ended on an ambivalent note.

  What will become of Russia if it is populated by men like Tremsin, men for whom nothing is too costly, and for whom nothing has value?

  Hoping for follow-up, Jacob opened the Novaya Gazeta homepage, clicked the little British flag to bring up the English-language edition. He typed Natalia Honcharenko’s name into the search box.

  The first item that came up was from 2008.

  Not by Honcharenko, but about her.

  JOURNALIST’S COLLEAGUES REMEMBER, CELEBRATE HER BRAVERY

  MOSCOW, May 21—Somber and frightened, angry and grieving, they gathered in the basement of the Bar Ogonek to pay tribute to their fallen colleague.

  One year ago, thirty-two-year-old Natalia Romanovna Honcharenko, an award-winning journalist for this paper, was gunned down outside her apartment.

  The case remains unsolved.

  “We thought about using the church around the corner,” said Alexei Kozadayev, an editor who worked with Honcharenko on a series of articles exposing corruption in Moscow’s Department of Urban Development.

  “We decided that this would be more to Natka’s taste. She came here often after work. And we should remember that she was not one to bow to authority.”

  Several of the evening’s attendees echoed this theme: Honcharenko’s unrelenting thirst for truth.

  “She ruffled their feathers,” remarked Renata Givental, a fellow journalist who has written for Novaya Gazeta and Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “They want us to be afraid.”

  Givental declined to specify who “they” were, adding, “Anyone with half a brain can figure it out.”

  While Honcharenko’s friends and coworkers may consider it obvious who is responsible for her death, police maintain a more circumspect attitude.

  Praporshchik Yury Filippov, speaking on behalf of the GUVD, said, “We continue to examine all possibilities.”

  Jacob scrolled down the list of articles to find when the story broke.


  June 2007, about nine months after Honcharenko’s profile on Tremsin first appeared.

  A masked man rode up on a motorcycle as she left her building. He pulled a handgun, shot her once in the back of the head, twice more when she fell, and drove off.

  No shortage of suspects. Therein lay the problem. She was an investigative journalist in the new Russia. Threats came with the territory, and pissing off powerful people was her stock-in-trade. Among those she had vivisected in print, Tremsin was neither the most prominent nor the most notorious.

  Jacob searched for hours without finding further information about Tremsin’s tenure in Czechoslovakia. It stood to reason that few writers would want to tackle the subject, given what had happened to Honcharenko.

  He needed that interpreter, badly. He sent Mallick a second request, then returned to the FT profile, reading and rereading the Prague section, scrutinizing every turn of phrase with Talmudic fervor. He felt like he was tilting a photograph, trying to fudge the angle: it was all tantalizing surface. He googled TechAnsch, Norilsk, Laboratory 12. Plenty to read. Nothing of substance.

  He googled vlaštovka.

  The first line of the first hit bounced him out of his seat.

  Native to every continent except Australia and Antarctica, the barn swallow is the most common species of swallow in the world.

  Sweating, he clicked the link.

  The Web page showed a picture of a little bird, perched delicately on a branch.

  Mashed potatoes, rising to life.

  His mother, choking on bread.

  Swallowing it down.

  She had been talking to him all along.

  He hadn’t been listening.

  A hot tide rose in his own throat.

  He stumbled to the bathroom and heaved up fifty dollars’ worth of booze. He rinsed his mouth until it stopped burning; tore off his shirt and ran a cold washcloth over his body.

  In the bedroom he lay down on the unmade sheets. He gave himself ninety minutes to sleep, setting an alarm for eight-thirty in the morning, late afternoon in Prague.

  • • •

  JACOB HAD LIEUTENANT JAN CHRPA’S number listed in his phone under Czech Detective. He didn’t know if it was current. The voice that answered ahoj sounded different, free of wheezy edge. But the background track was identical: kids, screaming.