The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Jacob took out his phone to text Vallot, check his e-mail.

  No bars.

  He got up and paced. “They could’ve kicked us out.”

  “They will, soon as they figure out what we know,” Schott said. He brushed dried mud from his cowboy boots. “Crissake, sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

  “You should be.” Jacob paused by a carved mahogany credenza to wiggle the spout on a samovar. “I am.”

  He tried the door. Locked from the outside.

  “Fantastic,” Schott said.

  They waited for twenty-two minutes before a portly man with a gray pompadour entered. As the door swung shut, Jacob glimpsed three guards in the hall.

  Whatever diplomatic training Rodonov had received prior to his posting was lost on this fellow. He stuck out his palm.

  “Identification.”

  Jacob gave up his badge. Schott did the same.

  “You are policemen.”

  “We are.”

  “Why didn’t you say so immediately?”

  “Are you the house manager?”

  “I am the person to whom you are talking,” the man said.

  He placed their badges on the table. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m sure Mr. Rodonov told you.”

  “You tell me.”

  “Lidiya Georgieva.”

  “The name is unfamiliar.”

  Jacob laid out a photo of Lidiya’s corpse. “How about the face?”

  The man recoiled, gagging.

  “No?” Jacob began digging in his bag. “Want to see her son?”

  The man put up a hand. He had averted his eyes. “That will not be necessary.”

  “You sure? It might jog your memory.”

  “Remove this, please.”

  Jacob leaned over and retrieved the photo.

  The man contemplated the table, reading an invisible chessboard.

  He said, “We can agree that what happened to Miss Georgieva was tragic.”

  “And her son,” Jacob said. “Let’s not forget him.”

  “Yes. Her son. Very tragic, we can all agree. However, I cannot see how American police officers should come to be involved.”

  “The case may be connected to one of ours.”

  “The correct step would be to broach the matter with the French authorities.”

  “I have. I wanted to give you the opportunity to provide your perspective.”

  The man said, “The case you refer to—it must be important, to bring you all the way to France.”

  “The night Lidiya and Valko were killed,” Jacob said. “You had a party here.”

  “We have frequent parties,” the man said. He appeared to have recovered from the shock of seeing the photos; his smile showed smoker’s teeth. “Russians are a people full of joy.”

  “It was a reception for visiting businessmen,” Jacob said. “We need to know who was here.”

  “That is impossible.”

  “You keep a visitor log. We signed it on the way in. The security tapes from that night, I need to see them, too.”

  “We’ve cooperated fully with the French police. Beyond that, I cannot help you.”

  “I’d like to speak to the ambassador.”

  The man chuckled. “Out of the question.”

  “Arkady Tremsin,” Jacob said.

  Silence.

  “You’re familiar with him.”

  “Familiar, no.”

  “You know him.”

  “I know who he is, naturally. Everyone does.”

  “What’s your government’s relationship to him?”

  “There is none to speak of. Mr. Tremsin renounced his citizenship.”

  “What led him to do that?”

  “You would have to ask him.”

  “I understand he got in some trouble back in Moscow.”

  “I can provide no further comment.”

  “What about this guy?” Jacob said, calling up the photo of Knob Neck on his phone and holding it out. “Who is he?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “He’s Russian.”

  “I don’t know every Russian in Paris, Detective.”

  “He’s hard to forget,” Jacob said. “Six foot five. Big ugly scar on his neck.”

  “I hope you realize,” the man said, “that your mere presence here constitutes an affront.”

  “Against your government or Tremsin?”

  The man said nothing.

  Jacob said, “I need to see those tapes.”

  The man smiled faintly. “You have such an amusing way of using that word.”

  “What word is that.”

  “‘Need.’” He stood up. “Wait here.”

  Time passed.

  Ten minutes.

  Schott said, “This is fucked.”

  “What are you complaining about?” Jacob asked. “You like Russian literature, it should be a special treat.”

  Twenty minutes.

  “You’re right,” Jacob said. “Super fucked.”

  Thirty.

  He addressed the CCTV camera in the corner of the ceiling.

  “Open up, please,” he said. “I have to use the bathroom.”

  He dragged over a chair, climbed up, began waving at the camera.

  “Open up or I’m going to piss in your samovar.”

  A bolt turned; the door opened. The portly man was back, along with a platoon of security guards and, alpha dog in a stylish black pantsuit and unforgiving four-inch heels, Odette Pelletier.

  “Get off the chair,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  BOHNICE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

  PRAGUE

  FALL 1982

  Bina lies on the cell floor, shivering, her head in Majka’s lap, soft filthy fingers kneading her locked shoulders.

  “I was pretty,” Majka says. “That was my problem.”

  She still is. Bina wishes she could tell her.

  “My father was a railway mechanic. When I was seventeen, a hydraulic lift failed and crushed him. His pension wasn’t enough to support my mother and me, so I took a job as a typist for the Ministry of Information.”

  A deep, unexpected laugh. “I thought it’d be a good way to meet a nice man.”

  From down the hall comes the gruff duet of a scuffle, whistles blown, orderlies responding. The law dictates that patients remain out of their cages from seven a.m. to seven p.m., a requirement scrupulously observed, due to the entertainment it provides: fights are an hourly occurrence on Lunatics’ Boulevard.

  In some ways, the ward affords greater license than the world outside. Statements that would get an ordinary citizen thrown in jail are here made with impunity. The food is shit, the government a bunch of assholes. Who cares what they say? They’re crazy. The result is the highest concentration of rational thought in Czechoslovakia.

  Majka massages Bina’s forearms. “You feel looser today, sister.”

  Bina nods her head a fraction of an inch. They wheeled her from room nine less than an hour ago and already she can move her extremities.

  A good sign. A bad one? Her body is acclimating, accepting its fate.

  From there it’s a short distance to surrender.

  This morning marked the sixth day of her treatment.

  Or the eighth.

  The twentieth.

  Does it matter?

  Yes. Yes. It matters. She has a son, she must see him again, she will see him, she owes it to him to keep count.

  When Dmitri, the tall Russian orderly, comes to unlock her cage; when he wheels her down the corridor toward room nine and other patients look away and fall silent; when she is draped like an offering upon the gurney; when Tremsin enters, chattin
g about the weather; when he screws off the iron ring and clacks it down on the counter and snaps on rubber gloves and draws up the syringe, it is Jacob’s face that Bina fixes in her mind.

  The image has begun to bleed at the edges.

  She can hardly remember what he looks like.

  How did it happen so fast?

  She is weak.

  To keep herself from drifting, she clings to Majka’s voice.

  “The apparatchik in charge of my bureau—his name was Smolak—he used to keep a bowl of almonds on his desk.”

  Gently, she bends and straightens Bina’s right hand. Bina funnels her entire consciousness there, driving her soul into her fingers.

  Majka nods encouragingly. “That’s it. Pretty soon you’ll be massaging me.”

  Bina grunts.

  “Don’t think I won’t hold you to it. I could use a massage. I could use a shower, eh? It’s not hot, but it’s water. Keep thinking of that, it’ll give you something to live for.”

  Jacob. I have Jacob to live for.

  “This fellow, Smolak, he never ate the almonds. They sat there in the bowl, day after day, driving me mad with their pointlessness. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I snuck into his office and stole a few to take home for my mother. You’ve never seen anyone so excited. The joy a few stale almonds could bring . . . It broke my heart and filled it.

  “The next day I braced myself for consequences. Nothing happened, so I did it again. Just a few. Again, nothing happened. I began scooping them out by the handful.”

  She moves on to Bina’s left fingers. Bina shifts her awareness accordingly.

  “The bowl . . . It was an elegant little crystal thing. Genuine Moser, I think. It never seemed to empty out. I would come in and find it miraculously refilled. It had to end, of course: Smolak summoned me to his office. He had a strange-looking lamp on the desk. When I held my hands under the light, my skin lit up. He’d put invisible powder on the almonds. It was all over me—under my nails, on my sleeves.

  “He was an ugly one, Smolak. He came around the desk and put his hand on my cheek. Then up my dress. He said, ‘Show me what you know.’”

  Majka shifts out from under her, resting Bina’s head on a bunched woolen blanket.

  “Can you bend your knees?”

  Bina tries.

  “Good, sister. Keep at it. ‘Show me what you know . . .’ I knew nothing. I was a virgin. After he finished, he said, ‘You have a lot to learn. But you’re pretty, that can’t be taught.’

  “He sent me to an address in Zličín. It was a plain-looking house. From the outside you’d never guess what went on in there. Our instructors were a pair of StB officers, one male and one female. We knew them as Uncle and Aunt. They would mock up different settings: a fancy restaurant, a bus stop, a hotel room. The two of them would act out scenarios, from a script, which we then had to copy. Bend your leg. You can do it.”

  Bina fights against the rigidity. Pain flares brightly up and down her spine. Recently, Tremsin has begun adding a dose of purified sulfur to her daily thirty milligrams of haloperidol, interested in how the two drugs interact.

  They interact to create a scorching fever; chisels rammed through her joints.

  Majka says, “They may have actually been married, Uncle and Aunt. Each would smile when the other one misspoke, filing it away for the future. Their lovemaking was very thorough, too, like they were going down a checklist.

  “In addition to me, there were eight girls and three boys. The boys were ravens and we were swallows, so obviously the house was called the Nest. I was the only one from Prague. Aunt said they preferred to recruit from the countryside, because city air destroyed a woman’s skin. She never liked me. She always called me by my full name, Marie. No one ever called me that, except her. Uncle, though. He was nice.”

  Majka reaches for Bina’s right thigh, the tenderer of the two. The pressure makes Bina want to weep. She can’t. Her system won’t respond. So she weeps in her mind. She sees herself doing it and feels some small relief.

  She could live the rest of her days like this. An imagined life.

  She wonders if she could imagine herself to death. Picture her wrists opening and then actually have it render in the flesh, like stigmata. So easy to yield.

  Jacob.

  Her innards heave; her knee bends.

  “Sister. Well done. You rest a bit, now . . . Those were busy months, in the beginning of my training. We learned how to make conversation with a Westerner, how to flirt; we learned how to drink without losing control. We learned how to please a man, the ravens how to please a woman. We practiced while everyone watched. Aunt and Uncle would take notes or shout out instructions. ‘Lift your leg higher.’ ‘Make more noise! Men like noise.’” She shakes her head. “When the boys ran out of steam—they were young, but we outnumbered them—we practiced on Uncle.”

  Another laugh. “Perhaps that explains why he was so cheerful. He practiced with the boys, too. Everyone had to be prepared for all types. That was a revelation, that a person could like both men and women. We never questioned or resisted. We were patriots. My mother’s pension checks doubled, she could afford cigarettes. The night before there was meat in the shops, someone called to tell her.

  “It wasn’t all fun and games. We learned anti-interrogation techniques. Not the heavy stuff—they couldn’t damage the merchandise—but enough. I already knew some Russian, and they taught me basic English and German. My first assignment was Vienna.

  “I don’t think they wanted to challenge me excessively, right out of the gate. He was a file clerk in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I met him in the lobby of the Hotel Imperial, they used to have a nice café there . . . Can you imagine me, barely nineteen, a seductress? They taught us to step out of ourselves. It’s a skill you never forget, it comes in handy throughout life.”

  Doesn’t it. Bina forces up the corners of her mouth.

  “How nice to see you smile, sister.”

  Soft filthy fingers stroke the inside of Bina’s wrist.

  “They rented me a flat in Alsergrund, and before long the clerk was turning up in the middle of the day, two, three times a week. His breath stank of mustard. He was married—they always were, to give you leverage if things soured—and in his wallet I found a snapshot of his wife. He’d done well for himself. She wasn’t at all bad-looking. Yet he would lie there, smoking and complaining about her, his boss, his coworkers. He was one of those who believes the world hasn’t given him his due.

  “I was with him for about a year. I got what I could. Uncle and Aunt were pleased. They reassigned me to Berlin, then back to Vienna. Everywhere I went, I brought my lingerie and my F-21. I carried that stupid camera all over Europe. They even sent me to Oslo, which was considered the most difficult environment for a swallow to operate in, because of the Scandinavians’ clinical attitude toward sex. My lover there was very handsome. He thought he was doing me a favor. Americans and British were the easiest to turn. I don’t mean to be rude, sister; that was what I was taught, and in my experience it held true.

  “I was good at my job. My mother had what she needed, right up until the end. When she died, it was in the hospital, like a civilized person, not languishing at the bottom of a waiting list. I traveled. I met people. I served my country and the cause.

  “It ended. It always does. I got pregnant. A faulty pill, I guess, or I forgot to take one. The father was a chemist for a Swiss petroleum corporation, working to improve the efficiency of diesel fuel. Odd, what stays with you: I couldn’t tell you the color of his eyes, but if you gave me a pencil and paper, I could probably reproduce the formulas.

  “I reported back to Uncle and Aunt, assuming they would have me end the pregnancy. That was the usual method. No, they said; it could be used to our advantage. I had recently turned thirty. They wanted to wring every last drop out of me. They ha
d me blackmail the chemist by threatening to tell his wife.”

  Majka resumes working Bina’s calves. “It didn’t go to plan. He poisoned himself.”

  Out in the hall, a bell rings.

  “I’d botched the assignment, but they surprised me, saying I could keep the baby. A token, I suppose, for my service. Try moving your ankle, please. Harder. Good.

  “My gift . . . His name is Daniel. He’ll be seven soon. Almost girlish, he’s so pretty.”

  Sorrow fogs her smile. “You know, sister, I love our conversations, but you should feel free to speak up.”

  “Jacob,” Bina says.

  Majka blinks, startled.

  “Jacob,” Bina says. Her jaw, a wedge. The effort, unthinkable. “Jacob.”

  “Sister.” Majka starts to laugh, tears slicing dirt. “Sister. That’s your son? Jacob?”

  The bell rings on, insistent.

  “Jacob. That’s good, sister, a good solid name. Don’t let go of it.”

  The door opens.

  Dmitri enters pushing the wheelchair, murmurs in his accented Czech:

  “Occupational therapy.”

  Majka bends over, forehead to the floor, while he slides his rubber gloves beneath Bina’s knees and lifts her into the chair.

  • • •

  THEY JOIN THE LINE headed down the Boulevard, a caravan of ghosts in paper slippers. Dmitri flares his elbows to protect Bina from jostling bodies. The blanket slips down her knees and he reaches down to draw it back up.

  “Are you warm enough?” he asks.

  Does he expect an answer? If anything, she feels hot, because of the sulfur.

  Dmitri Samilovich. She’s heard Tremsin call him that. A banality she clutches, to keep her memory from atrophying along with her body.

  They reach the Group Therapy Room, set with five long tables, twenty seats apiece. He wheels her to her assigned spot.

  The law dictates sixty minutes of productive labor per day. For the past week, the women have made boxes out of cardboard scraps. Unable to lift her hands, Bina has received seven demerits, resulting in loss of food, which some might consider a blessing.

  Now an excited buzz rises: paper and glue are gone, replaced by lemon-yellow balls of Plasticine.