The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The head nurse stands on the podium and toots her whistle three times. “Today the patients will be making ashtrays.”

  The buzz hardens to a discontented edge. Ashtrays? For whom? Each patient receives one cigarette per day, to be hoarded or traded or fought over. Ashtrays? It’s a task meant to degrade them.

  “The patients will be quiet, please.” The whistle shrills. “Quiet.”

  The silence fills with the sound of two hundred diligent thumbs.

  Fat Irena leans in. “Did you hear? Brezhnev is dead.”

  Olga snorts.

  “I don’t give a damn if you don’t believe me. It’s true.”

  “How many times has Brezhnev died before? And yet he’s still alive.”

  Bina stares at the table, distant and swimming, the knob of yellow like a close and unreachable sun.

  You can’t make anything meaningful from Plasticine. It doesn’t last.

  Nothing lasts.

  “You’ll see,” Olga says. “You’ll be eating your words.”

  “I’ll be eating your liver, you dried-up cunt,” Fat Irena says.

  A nurse comes storming up the aisle. “No talking.”

  “She started it,” Olga says.

  “No. Talking. You,” the nurse says to Bina. “Why are you sitting there.”

  “She can’t move,” Majka says.

  The nurse grabs the ball of Plasticine and shoves it roughly into Bina’s hands.

  “Work heals,” she says, and walks on.

  A weak squeeze is all Bina can manage, yet the material yields, as though bowing to a higher authority. The coolness against her burning skin feels delicious and strange.

  She is hardly aware of what she’s doing while she’s doing it. Nobody else notices her. They are busy not talking, busy looking busy.

  The bells rings and Majka turns around and her mouth falls open in astonishment.

  “Oh, sister.”

  Bina thinks The edges could be sharper.

  The women crowd around to gawk.

  “Look at that,” Fat Irena says. “It lives.”

  “Hers is better than yours,” Olga says.

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  Tittering, they clear the aisle to make way for Dmitri and the chair.

  He stops short, staring like the rest of them.

  The nurse returns. “What’s going on here? What is that?”

  “You were right,” Majka says tremulously. “Work does heal.”

  “We’re not making jars. We’re making ashtrays.” The nurse snatches the tiny, symmetrical form from Bina’s limp fingers and crushes it back into a ball. “Next time pay attention to the assignment.”

  • • •

  BREZHNEV IS DEAD. Like the collective soup bowl, the rumor gets passed around so that all may have a taste. After a while even Olga is forced to admit it smacks of truth, and Fat Irena takes to parading up and down Lunatics’ Boulevard, crowing that it was she, she was the one to break the news, until Olga spreads a counter-rumor that Fat Irena got the news from a guard in exchange for sucking him off, leading to a brawl that sends one woman to the infirmary, the other to solitary confinement.

  Brezhnev is dead.

  They do not allow themselves to hope. Hope is too costly, hope is a mythic beast. Schadenfreude, though, that they have, in spades. For they have outlived him, the bastard Brezhnev with his pompous eyebrows and his titanic jowls, military medals spilling down his left breast; Brezhnev, architect of their despair, who sent in the tanks in ’68 to flatten the green shoots of change.

  He is dead.

  The next morning, no one comes to fetch Bina for treatment.

  “See?” Majka says. “I told you he’d get bored of you, eventually.”

  That much hope Bina can’t afford.

  But then a second day passes and no one comes to collect her, and Bina can move her arms and legs. No one has seen Tremsin at all, and more rumors bubble up: the doctor has fled, fearing the retribution that accompanies any change in regime. He has (imagine it!) committed suicide out of solidarity with the General Secretary.

  A third day arrives. No one comes to get her. Bina can talk now, a few words at a stretch, and she greedily repurposes the hours spent in Majka’s company, scrambling to tell her. Tell her everything, do it while her tongue is working, while she has the chance, before the nightmare resumes, put it all on record: who she is, where she comes from, the names of her loved ones.

  She talks until her mouth runs dry, telling Majka the story of her life. A pact: if one of them does not survive, the other will carry her memory out. That night, they sleep with fingertips touching through the wire of their cages, another pact, one beyond words.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Bina feels even better.

  She wouldn’t have thought it possible, given her circumstances, but she feels good. She decides to tell Majka her story again, start to finish. Only it’s different now: she’s remembering new things, parts of herself that she forgot to include yesterday.

  “It’s good to talk, sister. Get it all out.”

  She will, she will. There’s so much more to her than Bina Lev, wife and mother. There’s Barbara Reich, the thinker, the seeker, who gave up her name. Both of them.

  Why did she give up her name?

  She almost regrets it now. Reich means “rich,” she comes from royalty, they hate her because she is better.

  By the fifth morning, she has learned not to fear the dawn. No one is coming for her. The worst is over. And she’s remembering even more.

  She starts talking.

  Majka says, “Sister, are you feeling all right?”

  Bina’s more than all right. She’s fantastic. She wants to tell Majka, tell the world.

  “Lower your voice,” Majka says, watching her with worried eyes. “Someone will hear you.”

  Bina laughs. So someone will hear. So what? She’s not afraid of them. She’s not afraid of anything.

  She walks in circles around their cell, talking about what she’s going to do once she leaves. She promises: she’s going to get out of this place—fly through the window, if necessary—and once she does, she’s going to come back for Majka, for all of them; she will tear down the walls of the asylum and set them free hallelujah!

  “Sister, please rest. You’re going to exhaust yourself.”

  Who needs rest? It’s the fifth day of her own personal creation, the day of the animals and beasts of the field; she has more energy than ever, certainly the most she’s had since Jacob was born, and by the way, did she tell Majka about Jacob, her son, Jacob?

  For a moment, her heart swells with pain.

  In the next moment, though, the pain is gone, and she resumes walking talking laughing planning. She has so much to do. So much to say.

  Fat Irena returns to the cell, eleven thick stitches over her eye.

  “What the hell is wrong with her?” she asks. “Why won’t she shut up?”

  Majka tearfully shakes her head.

  Bina doesn’t understand. Why is Majka crying? She ought to be happy for her, she feels incredible, the best she has in her whole life.

  “She’s gone mad,” Fat Irena says. “She wasn’t before, but the place did it to her.”

  Bina laughs and goes over to help her. She has healing in her fingertips. She will make those stitches vanish!

  Fat Irena swats her hand. “Don’t touch me, you crazy cow.”

  On the sixth day, which is the day of the creation of man, Bina receives visitors.

  Her father, her mother, Rav Kalman, her uncles Jakub and Jakub.

  Her husband. Her son.

  Oh how happy she is to see them! She weeps joyously. She missed them. They come to surround her with their love, their thousands of arms.

 
Dmitri says, “Hold her down.”

  Bina screams.

  The needle goes in.

  • • •

  ON THE SEVENTH DAY, Bina rests.

  • • •

  A crag of filtered light on the ceiling. Weight on her chest.

  “Good afternoon.”

  She sits up, with difficulty. Swivels her aching head.

  Beside her sits Dmitri, his spindly frame bent forward. He smiles kindly.

  “You had a psychotic episode,” he says. “It can happen when medication is withdrawn abruptly. You’ve been asleep for twenty-two hours. Before that, you were awake for four days. You must be hungry.”

  She is—painfully thirsty, too.

  He nods. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Alone, coming to her senses, she takes in her new surroundings: a concrete room, high and narrow, like an elevator shaft. Unlike her previous bed, this one has no cage surrounding it. Otherwise it’s just as ugly as her former cell.

  She peels back layers of holey, sopping blankets, swings her bare feet to the floor, and stands, leaning on the chair. She lets go of the chair and swoons. Once she’s sure her knees aren’t going to give out, she hobbles to the window, trying to see out. Bird droppings and soot streak the glass.

  Behind her, the door opens.

  She spins around, nearly losing her balance.

  Dmitri stands on the threshold, looking fairly astonished to find her out of bed. He holds a tray with a mug, a few slices of brown bread.

  A syringe.

  Bina sees it and her stomach bottoms out; she sinks down against the wall, pressing herself back, trying to make herself small, whimpering and covering her face.

  “No,” she says. “Please.”

  “Listen to me,” he says.

  She hears him set the tray down; the sound echoes strangely.

  “Bina. This is not the same as before.”

  “No.”

  “He was giving you enormous doses. This is much less. It’s not going to hurt you. You need it, or else you could become psychotic again. Please listen to me.”

  “No, no, no . . .”

  He takes a step toward her, and she flinches, bracing herself for the bite of the needle. But it doesn’t come, and when she looks again, he is simply standing there, a forlorn look on his face. The syringe still sitting on the tray.

  Dmitri picks it up. “I’ll be back later,” he says. “For now you should eat.”

  • • •

  BY NIGHTFALL, she has started to see and hear things, to rage at the air, attack the walls, every cell in her body in rebellion. She possesses just enough of her faculties to experience it as pure torture.

  At some point Dmitri returns with the syringe, and she does not resist as he swabs her arm. He has swapped out his rubber gloves for leather ones, his ill-fitting orderly’s jacket for a greatcoat that gives him an unexpected grandeur. He carefully injects her with a small amount of amber liquid. “There.”

  Almost immediately, calm drapes her. Her head lolls. She starts to lie down.

  “No no,” he says, propping her up. “I need you to get dressed.”

  He faces away to give her privacy.

  Moving in syrup, she pulls on the clothes he has brought her—underwear, a pair of stiff canvas pants, a woolen sweater, woolen socks. They might have fit her at one point, but her drastic weight loss means they hang on her like damp rags. Rubber-soled shoes are close enough. She wiggles her toes, amazed not to feel the dirty floor. She had forgotten the dignity of real shoes.

  He turns, looks her up and down. Nods. “Hurry, please. I left the car running.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Pelletier’s car, a blue Peugeot, sat in the embassy parking lot.

  “Get in,” she said.

  “Where we going?”

  “Just get in.”

  Jacob glanced at the mob of security guards that had escorted them from the elevator. He glanced at Schott.

  They got in the back.

  “Nice of them to call you,” Jacob said.

  Pelletier said, “Safety belt, please.”

  The two police vans had backed up to block the driveway. They parted, staying behind as Pelletier made a right, another, headed toward Boulevard Lannes.

  “You can just drop us at the corner,” Jacob said, feeling for the door handle. It moved easily but failed to catch. He glanced at Schott, who shook his head: the same.

  “Are we under arrest?” Jacob said.

  She drove south down the boulevard, downshifting as traffic backed up. “You were to wait for my call. You are a tourist, here at the pleasure of the French government.”

  She stomped the brake to avoid a wayward bicyclist.

  Schott said, “You mind telling us where we’re headed?”

  Jacob could guess: the station on Avenue Mozart.

  Instead, Pelletier worked her way over into the right turn lane, shifting into a higher gear and rocketing over the Boulevard Périphérique overpass, bound for the interior of the Bois de Boulogne.

  The sun had fallen, leaving bruised spaces between the trees. Jacob became aware of her perfume, light and grassy, saturating the Peugeot’s confined space. In the front foot well, a lipstick case strobed bars of streetlight.

  “In my view, this is the killer’s likeliest route,” she said, dodging a man-sized branch felled by wind. “In terms of distance, it would be shorter to have turned at Porte de la Muette. Given the location of the bodies, I consider it more logical that he came from this direction, so that the car was oriented northeast along Allée de Longchamp. It’s a busy street. You don’t want to be shepherding captives across four lanes of traffic.”

  She downshifted. “I suppose it’s possible he made a U-turn.”

  Jacob said, “You think Lidiya and Valko were still alive at that point.”

  “I imagine so. Easier to march them into the woods under their own power.”

  They wound along for a few minutes. At the next major intersection, Pelletier hung a right, slowing to allow Jacob and Schott a look at the pucker-mouthed women haunting the shadows, dotting the walking paths, shivering in fishnets and boots. A few bold enough to openly solicit passing cars.

  “As you can see, it’s an active area for the sex trade. I tracked down every prostitute I could find. They all claim to have seen nothing.”

  A barrier of wooden stumps pounded into the earth prevented vehicles from straying onto the path. Roughly every fifty yards, one had been pried loose, the curb ground down to nonexistence by thousands of tires and front bumpers.

  Pelletier said, “You find these turnouts at various places along the allée.”

  Jacob made out the fuzzy mounds of parked cars, the flash of reflective plastic.

  A prostitute materialized at the tree line, picking at her sleeve. Stumbling after her came a middle-aged man in a flaccid raincoat.

  Pelletier had switched on her hazards and was crawling along, hunting for a particular spot. A quarter mile on, she said, “Voilà.”

  She eased the Peugeot up onto the path, threading between a pair of oaks. A park bench sat directly in front of them. She steered around it to access a nook of sorts, partially hidden from the road by saplings and hardened vines.

  She brought the car to a halt and yanked up the parking brake. “God knows what they imagine the three of us are doing back here.”

  She killed the motor. The Peugeot fell still.

  Jacob could hear distant, fractured laughter, the sonic froth of the road.

  Pelletier said, “The important thing, from an investigative standpoint, is that you could leave a car parked here for quite a while without anyone noticing it.”

  “Long enough for him to get them to the clearing, kill them, come back.”

  “More than e
nough.” She pointed through the windshield. “It’s straight that way, about a hundred twenty meters.”

  She turned, propped an elbow on the armrest. “I can take you there. As I said, mud and trees. Your shoes will suffer.”

  He wondered how sincere the offer was, given her heels. “We’ve already been.”

  “I see.” Not asking how.

  She faced front. “I’ve been thinking about the mechanics of the abduction. My assumption is he held a gun to the child’s head to motivate the mother’s compliance.”

  Jacob said, “I need to talk to Tremsin.”

  “Yes, you’ve said that. I don’t suppose you’ve come up with a better reason.”

  “There’s this.”

  He opened the photo of the Gerhardt fob and set his phone on the armrest.

  She stared at it impassively. “A key chain.”

  “I found it at the scene. You know what car it goes with?”

  She shook her head.

  “A very, very expensive one. That very, very few people own. Eighty in the entire world. I’ll bet you can think of someone we know whose name’s on that list.”

  It was a bluff. A decent one. He couldn’t tell if it was working.

  She picked up the phone to look at the fob. “How did we miss it?”

  “It was under ice,” he said. “It came up with this year’s mushrooms.”

  She set the phone back down. “I’d like you to hand it over, please.”

  He said nothing.

  “It’s evidence,” she said. “I am investigating a murder.”

  “It’s in a safe place,” he said.

  “That’s a crime,” she said. “Tampering.”

  “It’s safe,” he said again.

  “Did you give it to Vallot?”

  “All I did,” he said, “was take a walk in the park.”

  “What else did he tell you? I saw him making photocopies. Were those for you?”

  Jacob didn’t want to sell Vallot out. But his hesitation seemed to confirm it for her.

  “Give them back, please,” she said. “Now.”

  Jacob said, “He told me about your time in Russia.”

  Pelletier’s mouth opened. She began to laugh. “Dédé told you that? Well. Good for him. He’s cleverer than I thought.”