They showed Jacob a time-stamped clip, soundless but in sharp, glorious color.
Molchanov, accompanied by two guards, riding up in the elevator.
A few minutes later, the guards rode back down.
Molchanov hadn’t left via the elevator.
He hadn’t left via the stairs.
The detectives had recovered his greatcoat, sopping wet.
But where was he?
Jacob said, “I don’t know.”
An uncomfortable silence.
Sibony commandeered the laptop and opened up a second clip.
An agitated Paul Schott paced in a cramped room, held at bay by a horde of guards.
“Fuck,” Jacob said.
He now knew what had drawn Molchanov in such a hurry; what had called the lone remaining guard off the floor. It was all hands to contain Schott, who snarled and stomped like an enraged steer, flushed, shaking, heedless of the forest of machine guns waving at him. Nude except for a pair of socks because they had strip-searched him.
Very brave.
Also very stupid.
Schott ran at them.
For a man of his size, he moved incredibly quickly—so fast, in fact, that none of the guards got a shot off. They piled on him instead, bodies merging to become a single frenzied ball of aggression, all fists and feet and errant muzzle flashes. Knowing the ending, Jacob found it hard to watch. At one point, Schott appeared to get the upper hand. He grabbed a weapon and took one of the guards as a human shield. He was yelling, attempting to muscle his way forward. He appeared to be making progress. The other men began to back off.
Jacob wanted to look away.
Dmitri Molchanov launched into the frame, firing without hesitation, emptying a clip through the guard and into Schott.
A bright flare bleached the screen, wrecking the camera’s focus before everything went black.
Vallot paused the video and opened a new window, showing a photo of the room, evidently taken later.
A bluish haze dusted on the walls.
Jacob sagged, sick with pride and loss.
The French detectives waited for his response.
What could he say?
Test the dust? Run it for DNA? Compare it to the stuff upstairs?
He let the silence drag.
Sibony sounded disturbed to admit that they’d been unable to locate his friend.
They weren’t finished searching the house, Vallot added.
• • •
MALLICK ARRIVED THAT AFTERNOON. The bags under his eyes were larger than ever. He shut the door, dragged over a chair, fell into it, and said, “Talk.”
Jacob complied, editing out his night over Paris with Mai, reducing her role in the spa to a cameo.
The Commander didn’t react until Jacob described the video of Schott’s final moments. Then his cheek twitched. “They have it on tape?”
“It’s inconclusive,” Jacob said. “They’re operating under the assumption that his body was moved somewhere.”
Mallick stared at him.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“For what part, precisely?”
“For what happened to Paul, sir. Truly sorry.”
If Jacob had ever expected a show of emotion, it was then. But Mallick just gave a curt nod. “Well,” he said. “This is a lot to unfuck. Even for us.”
Jacob said nothing.
Mallick said, “How close did you get to her?”
“Not close.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”
“The truth would be my preference.”
Jacob said, “Does Moscow have its own branch of Special Projects?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Molchanov was trying to get to Mai. Same as you.”
“Not the same,” Mallick said. “Not at all.”
“Then who was he?”
Mallick shook his head. “He isn’t the main problem.”
“Not to argue, sir, but he was a hell of a problem for me.”
“You’re missing the big picture,” Mallick said. “He’s one individual. What matters to me, Detective—and it should matter to you, too—is that there are others like him out there, waiting for their chance. Looking for her. Hunting her.”
Pale fingers clutched the bedrail. “Do you understand now, why it’s so urgent that we get her under control? If we don’t, someone else will. Believe me when I say you don’t want that.”
Jacob said, “How many others?”
The Commander’s brief look of bewilderment turned to dismay. “I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t even want to think about it. However many there were before, you can bet there’s going to be a lot more now, given how this went down. There’s no possible way I can stop the flow of information. With Pernath, we had corpses. But this . . . How many people were in that house? Fifty? A hundred?”
“They didn’t see anything,” Jacob said.
“At least a few of them did,” Mallick said. “They saw what happened to Paul. Forget them. A video? I don’t want to begin to think about it.”
His long legs shifted restlessly. “I’m not designed to operate in today’s world. None of us are. Media. YouTube . . . We’re forever scrambling to play catch-up.”
Jacob said, “Adapt or die.”
A hollow laugh. “The Internet is full of noise,” Mallick said. “Nobody believes anything anymore. That’s what I tell myself. But who can say?”
He looked at Jacob. “Now you know what keeps me up at night.”
“If it does get out,” Jacob said, “they’ll be hunting for me, too.”
Mallick said, “I think that’s a fair assumption.”
Silence.
“This is why we need to trust each other,” Mallick said.
The policeman’s promise: help me help you.
“I appreciate the offer, sir.”
“That doesn’t sound like yes.”
“I need to think about it.”
“What’s there to think about?”
“It’s a limited sample size,” Jacob said. “But when it comes to keeping me safe, sir, your track record sucks balls.”
A beat.
“Well, Lev,” Mallick said. “I appreciate the candor.”
The two of them sat for a while, a mutually respectful stalemate. A nurse came in to take Jacob’s vitals. When she’d gone, Mallick stood up.
“I’ll need the knife back,” he said.
“What knife, sir?”
Mallick smiled faintly. “Have it your way.”
“Can I ask a favor, sir?”
“I don’t need to define ‘chutzpah’ for you, do I, Lev?”
“Call my father. Tell him I’m all right.”
Mallick nodded. “I’m at the Bristol for a couple of days. Room six thirteen if you need me. Otherwise someone will be in touch as soon as feasible.”
“I appreciate it, sir.”
Mallick said, “See you on the other side, Detective.”
• • •
JACOB PAGED THE NURSE, asking her to check if his tall friend was still on the floor.
She came back reporting that he’d signed out.
Jacob thanked her, and she smiled and left, shutting the door quietly.
He counted to thirty, peeled back the blanket, and hobbled to the bureau.
In the bottom drawer was a plastic hospital bag containing his crusty, bloody socks and soiled shoes—the only clothing salvageable after the ER staff cut his shirt and pants to ribbons.
He pulled the sock out of the left shoe and fished out the two items he had taken from Tremsin’s house, smuggled out in one of those crusty, bloody socks.
Tremsin�
�s ring. The potter’s knife.
Jacob set the ring on the bureau.
Taking care not to tangle or yank his lines, knelt down, bending the blade of the knife against the linoleum.
The metal was thin but surprisingly tough. He grunted, his blood pressure monitor letting out a concerned bleep.
Jacob waited for it to level off, then resumed bending, bringing the blade to a ninety-degree angle before it snapped free of the handle and shot off like shrapnel, skittering under the bed.
He retrieved it and deposited it in the biohazard bin. The wooden knife handle he placed in the trash. He dropped the ring in the sock, rolled the sock up, stuffed it in the shoe. He rolled the shoes in the bag and put the bag back in the bottom drawer.
His heart rate monitor was alarming again.
He got into bed and groped around for the morphine button. He pushed it and earned an instant frisson of don’t care. Rough edges smoothed and he thought about Divya Das, back in L.A., wondering if he would get to sleep with her again.
He pushed the button again. Now he really didn’t care. He was the happiest, most carefree motherfucker in Paris.
He thought about Mai, frail and reduced, but sheltering, growing strong again.
He thought about his father. He wasn’t ready to forgive, but he wanted to be ready, he wanted to get there, and to encourage himself, he pushed the button a third time.
The machine beeped. It wouldn’t give him any more. He didn’t mind. He didn’t feel let down. The machine cared about him, and how nice to be cared about. He pushed the button anyway, and listened to the machine beep its refusal, and he thought about his mother, and he kept pushing the button, because it felt so satisfying to make a simple request, a simple chemical request. Even if the answer was no, there was reward in the asking. In some sense the asking was the reward, and so he kept pushing the button, long after the curtain had come down on consciousness and his head ran amok with images strung along the line that separated dreams from nightmares, long after the nurse had returned to find out what the racket was about.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Five days later, a deputy U.S. ambassador of reassuringly medium stature showed up to deliver Jacob a fresh passport and inform him that the embassy had succeeded in getting him cleared to leave France.
“Whether you’re healthy enough to travel is another question.”
The doctor didn’t think so. He refused to discharge Jacob, saying he could permanently damage his hearing if he got on a plane too soon.
As it turned out, a physician’s order carried a lot more weight in France than in the United States. Jacob spent the next several days stalking the halls.
He had to get away from the dry croissants, the stale coffee.
He had to escape the morphine machine.
There was a computer on the floor available for patient use. Jacob hacked chronologically backward through his e-mail. It was mostly junk, but there was a message from Divya, wishing him well.
And another from Susan Lomax.
She’d sent it on the afternoon of the visit to Tremsin’s house, at ten thirty-four a.m. California time, in response to the picture of Dmitri Molchanov Jacob had earlier mailed out.
Her reply was brief.
That’s him.
Jacob leaned on the keyboard tray, feeling short of breath.
If he’d contacted her sooner, maybe she’d have replied sooner.
Maybe he wouldn’t have gone inside the house.
Maybe Schott would be alive.
Jacob considered deleting the e-mail.
He kept it as a reminder to himself. Of what, he wasn’t sure.
• • •
BORED SHITLESS, his head annoyingly clear, he found himself thinking about Arkady Tremsin, who had mistaken him for someone else. He spent a long afternoon combing through open-access academic databases, reviewing all of Tremsin’s coauthors.
He found his answer in the February 1995 issue of Chemical Research.
A NEW METHOD FOR THE PURIFICATION OF TELLURIUM ALKYLS
A. L. Tremsin, J. M. Saint-Seurin, K. Viswanthan, F. L. Lev
One quick search revealed F. L. Lev to be François Louis Lev, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Lyon, at present teaching at the University of Calgary. The guy had an active Web page with a link to an e-mail address. Jacob thought about writing to him but decided there was no point.
• • •
EARLY ON A FRIDAY MORNING, Dédé Vallot came by with Jacob’s suitcase, retrieved from the hostel, as well as his badge, his wallet, and the Marquessa Duvall file, released from evidence.
The two of them got into Vallot’s white Citroën.
Within the confines of the car, he reverted to the guy Jacob had met in the bar—expansive, animated by a mixture of camaraderie, wonderment, and contempt for authority.
The investigation had started out promising. The fob had been printed and linked to Molchanov. Lacking proof of death, the higher-ups elected to consider him missing. He was wanted for questioning in the deaths of Lidiya and Valko Georgieva. Paul Schott was also listed as missing. The juge looking into Pelletier had requested a review of her records: phone, financial, and so forth.
That ended before it began. Vallot had it on authority from his buddy in intelligence that the General Directorate for Internal Security had intervened. The case was now classified. Vallot had been reassigned to the stabbing of a drug dealer.
He apologized for putting Jacob through the wringer. His exact words were: “I’m sorry for being this asshole.”
“If you’d like to make it up to me,” Jacob said, “I have a suggestion.”
• • •
AT THE AIRPORT, Vallot pulled into the parking structure, cut the engine, and handed Jacob his phone.
Jacob typed in Prague November 1982. “Toward the back of Tremsin’s library, in a locked case. The titles are in Cyrillic. There are a bunch of them. I only need the one.”
Vallot put the phone away without looking at it. “I think it’s too difficult.”
“Consider it, okay? That’s all I ask.”
Vallot nodded and popped the trunk.
In it were Schott’s suitcase and a plastic bag containing Schott’s clothes and cowboy boots, recovered from the mansion.
“I’m sorry for your friend,” Vallot said.
“Yours, too,” Jacob said.
• • •
A COP ON ONE END to see him off, a cop on the other to greet him.
Mel Subach waited behind LAX customs, leaning against a carpeted structural piling. He was noticeably thinner, but not in a healthy way, his nose filigreed with thin red lines, his blondish hair a crown of cowlicks.
He shook Jacob’s hand but avoided his eye. No banter as they got in the Crown Vic and headed for the 405.
Before signing the discharge order, the doctor had again cautioned Jacob against flying, and now Jacob felt a burning pain in his ear and heard an ominous fizzle, like a swarm of insects just over the horizon. He breathed through the discomfort and stared out at his city, its palette of beige and gray and chaparral brown, so different from Paris. The sour quality of the light. The corroded taste of the air.
It felt honest.
“Must be nice to be home,” Subach said finally.
Jacob sensed the rebuke. He was home; Schott wasn’t. As it was, he was wracked with guilt. He didn’t need more. But he glanced at Subach in the rearview and read the devastation written there; he remembered the shivah for his mother, the consolations that served primarily to bang the gong of absence.
What you wanted was a quick fix. A patch on your heart, strong enough to get you to the next station.
Quietly, he began to recount Schott’s last days, including the mundane and the unpleasant, the strange and the heroic. He talked about Schott
getting sick over the smell of lamb kebab; he repeated, to the best of his ability, Schott’s mini-sermon from that night.
Mel said, “I must have fifteen copies of that dumb book lying around. He kept buying it for me, like if he just did that enough, he could get me to read it.”
Jacob told him what else Schott had said: that Mel had saved his life.
Subach kept driving, watching the road, the hollow of his cheek glistening.
Jacob told him about getting slapped silly by Schott in the hostel lobby.
Mel burst into phlegmy laughter. “Yeah, he did have a temper on him.”
Jacob said that Schott had promised to show him his acting reel.
“That? It’s god-awful,” Subach said. “That’s why he was driving a limo. He told you he didn’t like Hollywood, right? Bullshit. He was just a lousy actor.”
Jacob told him about getting locked in a room at the Russian embassy. About the look on Schott’s face when Molchanov separated them.
He told him about the video and said, “He fought like hell.”
Subach dragged his sleeve across his nose. “Thanks for that.”
Jacob nodded.
“So,” Subach said. “What’s your first order of business?”
“Call my victims’ family.”
“And then?”
“Haven’t thought that far. See an ENT, probably.”
“The Commander’s asked me to advise you that your work at the archive is temporarily suspended.”
“Fine by me,” Jacob said. “Where do I report?”
“He hasn’t decided yet.” Subach paused. “He said don’t expect a bonus.”
• • •
AS THEY PULLED UP to the apartment, Jacob leaned forward and handed over the bag containing Schott’s boots and clothes.
Subach stared inside it for a few moments. “Don’t think these’ll fit me anymore.”
“The boots might,” Jacob said.
Mel nodded uncertainly.
“Anyhow,” Jacob said, “don’t be too hasty. You’ll probably gain the weight right back.”
Subach laughed. “Get bent.”
Jacob smiled and climbed out of the car.
• • •
HE PHONED Dolly Duvall.
The Golem of Paris Page 40
