The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  How long had they been at it? Two years running?

  Jacob said, “Can’t you turn on the television or something?”

  There was a pause.

  “This is the problem,” Jan said. “They fight about what to watch.”

  A bark in Czech, a dip in the noise, a return to full strength within moments.

  “Hold please,” Jan muttered.

  Jacob stretched out on his couch. He’d taken four Advil and eaten a piece of dry toast; physically, he felt a little less horrible, but his nightmares continued to reverberate.

  An attic, a garden, Bina’s twitching hands.

  As he listened to the bickering fade, it occurred to him that he knew next to nothing about Jan’s personal life, other than that he had a sister. Originally he’d assumed the kids to be Jan’s own. Later he’d changed his mind and decided they were younger siblings. He still didn’t have the answer. He didn’t know if Jan was married or gay or lived with his parents or what. They’d talked on the phone a couple of times and spent a single morning together, reconstructing a brutal crime.

  Yet he knew that Jan would remember him. What they shared was indelible. More than victory, it was trauma that united men.

  Jan came back on the line. “I’m happy to hear from you.”

  “Same here. You sound good.”

  “I’m okay, yes.”

  Jacob was glad to take a few minutes to shoot the shit. He asked after Jan’s sister, Lenka, and got an annoyed sigh in return.

  “She is becoming a police officer.”

  “No kidding. She went through with it?”

  “I told her this is a terrible idea. She doesn’t listen. For this I blame you.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “After you left, she was talking about you very often. I told her, forget this guy, he is bad news.”

  “I’d like to be offended, but you’re probably right.”

  “Of course I am right. You are dangerous. You come to Prague, you ask questions I don’t want to answer. I answer you anyway. Then you leave and I don’t hear jack shit.”

  “Your English has really improved,” Jacob said.

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “After the case broke, they shut me down. I couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

  “Cockblock,” Jan said.

  Jacob laughed, releasing some of the tension in his chest. “I wanted to call. They were monitoring my phone and e-mail. I didn’t want to cause more problems for you.”

  “It’s okay. I forgive you. But, Jacob, it was a very weird thing. Before I met you, I was in a lot of trouble.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then, two, three months after you went, my boss, he called me to his office. ‘Congratulations, you are getting a promotion.’”

  “Huh.”

  “Yes, but it is more weird.” An uptick in Jan’s breathing, a hint of the former rasp. “Before, I was poručík, lieutenant. After this comes nadporučík. My boss, he tells me they are making him major, and I will be kapitán. This is not normal.”

  “After I was pulled off the case, they gave me ten thousand dollars,” Jacob said.

  There was a pause before Jan asked, “Who are these people?”

  Jacob didn’t like lying to him. He said, “I don’t know how to answer you,” hoping the distinction between that and I don’t know would be lost.

  Jan grunted. “I never learned who killed this person.”

  Jacob recited LAPD’s official version of the story: acting with an accomplice, Richard Pernath was responsible for the murder of a former accomplice, Terrence Florack. Scotland Yard, accepting this explanation, had closed the file on the slaying of yet another accomplice, British national Reggie Heap, on foreign soil.

  “I don’t think you’re telling me everything,” Jan said.

  Jacob said, “Believe me: it’s for your benefit.”

  Jan was silent a moment. “The person who did it. He’s getting punished?”

  Jacob thought about the sorrow in Mai’s eyes in the instant before she left him.

  “No doubt about it,” he said.

  • • •

  JAN ABSORBED THE DETAILS of the Duvall/White homicide without comment.

  Jacob said, “This guy Tremsin was in Prague in the early eighties. He ran a psych ward at a place called Bohnice.”

  “I know it,” Jan said.

  “It’s still there?”

  “Yes, yes. They have many crazy people.”

  “Can you get in touch with them?”

  “I will try. You wonder if Tremsin’s doing the same thing here.”

  “It’s a question worth asking.”

  “I agree. But it will not be simple to learn. After Communism, there is a lot of confusion. The files are not complete, many were destroyed.”

  Jacob pictured the Vollmer Archive, writ huge. “I get it.”

  “This is terrible,” Jan said, “the mother and the son.”

  Jacob saw Bina cradling the photo of Thomas White Jr.

  The mutilated face.

  The endless stare.

  She recognized it.

  She’d seen it before.

  “What I think,” Jan was saying, “is to talk to ÚDV. This is the division for special cases that could not be investigated before, for political reasons.”

  “If Tremsin was working for the KGB, he probably had local protection.”

  “Yes, no, maybe. We have the files for StB, not KGB. There was not a lot of cooperation, they did not like each other. Did you ask the Russians?”

  “I’m waiting on a translator. I have a feeling they’re not going to talk so easily.”

  “I think you are right.”

  “Do me a favor? Ask around anyway. Anything helps. Whatever you can dig up.”

  “You are coming back to Prague?”

  “To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it. I’d love to, though. Someday.” Jacob laughed. “I still owe you a beer.”

  Jan said, “Now you owe me two.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  As Jan had suggested, the next logical step was to call the Moscow police. Tremsin had spent the majority of his last thirty years there.

  In the end, it was the simplest stuff that got you: Jacob couldn’t figure out which number he wanted. He tried a few at random and got nowhere.

  He e-mailed Mike Mallick a third time.

  He e-mailed Neil Adler, updating him with the name.

  He made coffee and began slogging through Russian news sites, searching for mother-child murders, mutilated eyelids, eliciting a barrage of pop-up ads for discount plastic surgery. By noon, he’d gotten to the point where he could sound out the characters in Cyrillic. He still didn’t know what any of it meant, though.

  The doorbell rang: his interpreter, arrived at last.

  Officer Anna Polinsky was a petite redhead in LAPD blues. Jacob had her wait outside while he hurried around the living room, depositing bottles in a trash bag, a clinking indictment he stashed in the bathtub. He brushed his teeth and smoothed down cowlicks, apologizing for the mess as he let her in.

  “I’m totally the same way,” she said in a voice that made clear she was not at all the same way.

  The colonel they reached at Moscow CID was determined to give them as little information as possible while simultaneously sucking Jacob dry.

  “What I want to know is if they’ve got anything with a matching MO.”

  Russian Russian Russian.

  “He says it’s impossible to determine. Moscow is a big city.”

  “I don’t expect him to give me an answer off the top of his head,” Jacob said. “He’s going to have to hunt around for it. Have him call me back.”

  Russian, Russian, Russian Russian Russian.


  “He says it’s not his responsibility.”

  “Then who should we be talking to?”

  “First he would like to know what proof you have against Arkady Tremsin.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m—”

  Russian Russian Russian Russian.

  “He would like to know,” Polinsky said, “if there are other crimes you suspect Tremsin may have committed while on U.S. soil.”

  “Tell him no and ask him about the Natalia Honcharenko homicide.”

  Russian, Russian, Russian Russian Russian.

  “He says he does not recall.”

  “It was front page for three months.”

  Russian.

  “There are no suspects.”

  “Now he remembers?”

  Polinsky shrugged.

  “Was Tremsin ever in the picture?”

  “He can’t answer that.”

  “What can he answer?”

  “First he would like to know what steps you plan to take.”

  “Jesus Christ, it’s an ongoing—okay, tell him I’m not taking any steps yet.”

  Russian Russian, Russian Russian.

  “If you’re not taking steps,” Polinsky translated, “then why are you bothering him?”

  Three more hours calling various branches; three hours of evasion and dismissal.

  “You don’t happen to speak French, do you?” he asked Polinsky.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Not my pay grade. Anyhow I’m going on shift soon.”

  He was glad to hear it. They’d been sitting together long enough that he was going to have to offer her a bite to eat soon, which would entail disclosing that he didn’t have a bite to eat, which would in turn necessitate running out to 7-Eleven. He thanked her for her help and the two of them called it a day.

  • • •

  HE DIDN’T call it a day.

  Instead he shifted his aim to Paris, where Tremsin now lived, working late into the night before coming up with a hit.

  QUI EST LA FAMILLE-X?

  A brief item from a Parisian daily, dated winter of last year. A woman and a young boy had been found murdered in a park. The cops were reaching out to the public for help identifying the victims.

  Oddly enough, there was no photo, which he would’ve thought useful in making an identification. He assumed they’d withhold anything unprintably gory, or of evidentiary value—missing eyelids, say, or gunshot wounds to the forehead.

  The statement released by the prosecutor’s office waxed dramatic.

  To depreciate a mother and child so is the greatest evil conceivable. We will not rest until we brought-have this monster to justice.

  Wondering what nuance he was missing, Jacob tried retranslating the sentence, a word at a time. Avilir meant “to depreciate.”

  It could also mean “to debase.”

  As good a term as any to describe what had been done to Marquessa and TJ.

  A second piece, a month later, implied that investigators had hit a brick wall.

  Captain Odette Pelletier of the DRPJ stated, “There are many avenues left to explore for us.”

  It was about eleven a.m. in Paris. Persistence led him to a guy who spoke heavily accented English and offered a limp assurance that he would locate Pelletier’s division and call Jacob back.

  “After lunch,” he said, and clicked off.

  Jacob lay down on the couch.

  The sun was up when he next opened his eyes.

  He looked at his phone: 6:48 a.m. No missed calls in the last five hours.

  One hell of a long lunch. He redialed.

  “Allo?”

  “Sorry if I’m interrupting dessert,” Jacob said.

  The guy said, “She will contact you.”

  “When?”

  “Later.”

  To Jacob’s surprise, the call came within the hour. He was further relieved when Odette Pelletier introduced herself in crystalline English.

  “This is a rare event,” she said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  He described the Duvall homicides.

  “May I ask what prompted you to assume there would be similarities to our case?”

  “There were no photos of the victims in the paper.”

  “Naturally. That would be disrespectful.”

  “Then how’d you expect anyone to recognize them?”

  “We hoped that someone would be looking. A friend, a boyfriend, a grandmother.”

  “No one stepped forward.”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “The statement said the victims were debased.”

  “Procureur Lambert isn’t one to avoid hyperbole,” she said.

  “Debased how? Their eyelids?”

  “Surely you can appreciate that I cannot discuss this over the phone.”

  “How about in person?”

  She laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve got time.”

  “You’d have to send your request to the juge’s office in writing.”

  “My victims were each shot once in the forehead. Small-caliber. Does that match?”

  “As I said—”

  “If you tell me they were strangled, I’ll hang up right now.”

  Silence.

  “They weren’t strangled,” he said.

  “I never said that.”

  “You’re still here,” he said.

  A beat. “Anything else, Detective?”

  “What about a suspect? Any luck?”

  Another beat. She said, “We never got that far.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you?”

  “Just Arkady Tremsin.” He waited for a reaction. “Did that name ever come up?”

  “No.”

  “But you know who he is.”

  “Only by reputation.”

  “Which is?”

  “He’s very rich,” she said. “Like most very rich people, he values his privacy.”

  “You could take a look at him now,” Jacob said.

  “That’s up to me and the procureur.”

  “The procu—what is it?”

  “Procureur. Prosecutor.”

  “He’s like the district attorney.”

  “Of a sort. Technically I answer to him.”

  Sensing another point of entry, he said, “That must be a pain in the ass.”

  “Lambert and I have a good working relationship.”

  “Well, sure. I’m just saying, if you think Tremsin deserves a look—”

  “I never said that, Detective. You did.”

  “I’m trying to make your life simpler.”

  Pelletier asked, “Is there anything else?”

  “The victims,” he said. “Any progress since the article?”

  “Very little. We pursued the matter for several months. Their prints didn’t show up in our system or Interpol. The pathologist believes they’re Eastern European.”

  “Based on what.”

  “The mother’s features weren’t typically French.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘typically French’? She wasn’t carrying a baguette?”

  “This isn’t America. People wear their identities.”

  “Eastern European could be Russian.”

  “I suppose it could be, yes.”

  “Arkady Tremsin is Russian.”

  “I fail to see how that’s relevant,” she said. “Unless that’s how it works in America? People only kill their own kind?”

  “I was hoping you might be able to get me in touch with him,” he said.

  “I’m flattered you think I could obtain an audience.”

  “You could get a warrant.”

  “The juge would want a compell
ing reason to issue it.”

  “Let me send you the pictures of my crime scene,” he said. “Maybe that’ll convince you.”

  “Do as you like. Don’t expect a response any time soon.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll call you later.”

  “What for?”

  “I like your voice.”

  He said it to keep her on the line, but as it emerged he realized it was true. “We don’t have to talk about murder. We can talk about something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “Anything,” he said. “Except soccer. I don’t like soccer.”

  “It’s not a game for the impatient,” she said, and she hung up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Talking to Pelletier had been strangely invigorating. That seeped away over the next few days, as he recontacted potential witnesses.

  He e-mailed a photo of Tremsin to Alon Artzi, Farrah Duvall, Jorge Alvarez, Susan Lomax.

  Nobody recognized him.

  “He never got out of the limo,” Alvarez said when Jacob called him. “He might’ve stuck his head out once or twice, but I don’t think I ever got a solid look at him.”

  “Put him in a fur hat,” Susan Lomax said. “Can you do that? Photoshop one on?”

  Jacob sent the photo to Zinaida Moskvina. She didn’t reply, which he’d half-expected: she’d already said it was a flunky who came to see her, not Tremsin himself. He doubted he could get much more out of her, even if he rearrested Katie.

  Discouraged, he got in his Honda and drove to Culver City.

  • • •

  DIVYA DAS OPENED HER DOOR. Arched a thin black eyebrow. “This is a surprise.”

  “Pleasant one, I hope.”

  She motioned him in. “I’ll let you know once I’ve decided. Tea?”

  He nodded and took a seat at her kitchenette pass-through. “Thanks.”

  She put on the speed kettle. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to eat.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said.

  She looked at him, startled, and then they both started laughing.

  “I usually keep something around,” she said, rummaging in a cabinet, “in case of unexpected—ah. Here.”

  She triumphantly displayed a faded box of Wheat Thins. “Let no one say that I am not a gourmet.”