“It’s not that it’s a bad story,” Perel is saying.
Draw water: she pulls up the rope, takes the sloshing bucket in hand.
“It’s just that you’re a bad liar, Yudl.”
Tips it out on the ground.
Wait a minute. Wait. That’s not what she meant.
Draw water: her body begins lowering the bucket again.
“Truth shall sprout from the earth,” Rebbe declares.
“And righteousness shall be reflected from the heavens,” Perel replies. “Wonderful. Until then, let me do the talking, please.”
The second bucket she also dumps out.
Fool. That’s not what she meant.
But her body keeps going, heedless of the howling objections of her mind; it has one directive—draw water—and it fulfills it with perfect obedience, bucket after bucket, and each time she bends to lower the rope, the reflection that greets her repels her. It is a face like the knot of an oak tree—lumpy and lopsided, furred unevenly like lichen; a huge, cruel, stupid face, devoid of emotion. Is this how she is to exist? She would rather drown herself in the well. She cannot choose to do that any more than she can choose to stop, and she raises the bucket and pours it out and raises the bucket and pours it out until Perel yelps: the courtyard has flooded, ankle-deep.
“Yankele, stop!” Rebbe shouts.
She stops. She cannot understand why she has done something so plainly absurd, and she burns with hatred for her own idiocy.
“You have to be very careful how you phrase things,” Rebbe says.
“Apparently,” Perel says. Then she bursts into helpless laughter.
Rebbe smiles. “It’s all right, Yankele. It’s only water. It’ll dry.”
She appreciates their attempts to console her.
But that’s not her name. She has a name.
She cannot remember what it is.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The café was near the Charles Bridge. Jacob breakfasted with hungover backpackers on tasteless coffee and oily pastry, sizing up each of the waitresses against the archetypal Creeper victim—wispy, vulnerable—and waiting for a lull in service to flag down a petite, delicately featured redhead.
“Klaudia?” he said.
She pointed to the outdoor tables, attended by a homely brunette he’d ruled out right off the bat.
Big-shot detective. He reseated himself, smiling as the brunette brought him a new menu.
“Klaudia,” he said.
She reacted to his use of her name. “Prosím?”
“English?” he asked.
She showed him the translated menu options.
“You, I mean. Do you speak English?”
She pinched her fingers together to show how little.
“Can I talk to you? Can you sit down for a second?” He opened his badge. “I’m a policeman. Policie? Americký?”
She said, “Moment, please.”
She left and came back with a manager in tow.
“Sir, there is a problem?”
“Not at all. I was hoping to talk to Klaudia.”
Klaudia’s face slackened, and she craned up to whisper into the manager’s ear. His mouth corkscrewed in annoyance. He flashed Jacob a hand. “Five minutes.”
He directed them to the back of the kitchen, and they stood on watery rubber mats, conducting a largely one-way conversation, her responses limited to sign language and head movements. Engulfed in clouds of dishwasher humidity, she seemed dissociative, threatening to liquefy before his eyes—a not uncommon response to sexual trauma. He felt bad badgering her; he admired that she was putting on a good show; he wanted nothing more than to let her go, so she could run home to hide, rechecking the locks ten times before balling up under the covers.
Could she remember that night? (Yes.) Was it okay to talk about it? (Yes, okay.) She’d seen the man’s face? (Yes.) Was she sure it was the same man the lieutenant had shown her in the hospital? (Yes.) Did she see what had caused the man to let her go? (No.) Did she hit him? Elbow him? Kick him? (Yes, yes, yes.) Was she aware of the presence of another person? ( . . . no.) Had she heard anything, seen anything, while she was running away? (No.)
“I understand you’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I need you, please, to really try and think back. A voice, a hair color.”
She said, “Blotto.”
For a moment he thought she was mocking him—booze on his breath, left over from last night. He didn’t feel drunk. He didn’t think he was acting drunk. He’d never been the kind to leave the house with TP trailing from the seat of his pants.
She repeated, “Blotto.”
“Would you mind writing that down?”
She obliged.
Bláto.
“What is that?” he asked.
She started to sign an answer, but the manager then appeared, clapping his hands. “Okay, okay.” He thumbed out at the dining room.
Klaudia bent her head and vanished through the steam.
“Excuse me,” Jacob said. “Can you tell me what this means?”
The manager put on his reading glasses. “Bláto. Is . . . nnnnmm.” He took Jacob’s notepad and pen and sketched a half-inch tube, filling it in hazily with wavy lines—water.
“Vltava,” he said.
“The river.”
The manager added an arrow beside the tube, pointed. “Bláto.”
“Riverbank? Boat? Shore?”
“Nnn.” The manager made a squelching noise, then waved Jacob out back to the alleyway. From behind a reeking mound of trash bags he hauled out a plastic planter plugged with dry soil. He signed for Jacob to stay put.
“It’s okay,” Jacob said. “I can look it up on the Internet.”
But the manager was on a mission. He fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and poured it into the planter, kneading it into the soil. He scooped a dark, oozy handful and presented it to Jacob’s nose, giving him a whiff of cat piss and pesticides.
“Bláto,” the manager said.
Mud.
—
THE GHETTO WAS OPEN for business.
Fanny-packed tourists orbited tour guides waving plastic paddles and shouting in a half-dozen different languages. Tchotchke vendors flogged golem T-shirts, golem water bottles, miniature ceramic golems. The chalkboard outside the U Synagogy restaurant advertised two daily specials: a Golem Tenderloin and the ill-conceived Leg of Turkey à la Rabbi Loew—said limb stuffed with bacon.
He bought a ticket for the Alt-Neu, along with an updated guidebook to Jewish Prague, skimming it as he joined the queue.
There are several explanations for the synagogue’s remarkable name. Some say that the Jews of Prague, while digging the foundation for a new house of worship, discovered the remnants of a much older structure. Others suggest that the building was erected on the condition that it would exist only until such time as the Messiah arrived. In this account, the name “Alt-Neu” is a pun on the Hebrew words “Al-Tenai”—“on condition.”
Regardless of its origins, the Alt-Neu has become forever associated with Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel Loew (c. 1520–c. 1609), spiritual leader and mystic, who according to legend created the golem in the synagogue garret. When the creature proved unmanageable, the Rabbi was forced to destroy it, sealing its remains in the garret and forbidding anyone to enter on pain of excommunication. Some have cited the golem legend as the origin for Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein, as well as Czech playwright Karel science-fiction play R.U.R., which introduced to the world the word “robot” . . .
Three steps down into a gloomy, dogleg antechamber scented of groundwater. The temperature plummeted. Street-level windows revealed bare shins and double-knotted sneakers. To his right ran a corridor that ended at an arched iron door, the verso of the one outside. In front of him lay the entr
ance to the synagogue sanctuary. A rope forbade access to the women’s section.
He asked the ticket taker where the garret was.
Her expression implied that she had answered this question roughly a hundred billion times. She pointed beyond the barrier rope. “Closed.”
“Is it ever open?”
“No.”
“What about the women’s section? Does that open?”
She gave him the stink-eye. “On Sabbath,” she said. “For women.”
The pressure of the line was mounting behind him, so he stepped toward the sanctuary, where a bulletin board outside the entrance listed the upcoming service, that evening’s Kabbalat Shabbat, scheduled to commence at six-thirty.
For the moment, it was guidebooks and baseball caps, not prayer books and yarmulkes. Jacob joined the current of humanity making a circuit around the dais. The northern wall had viewing portals at eye height, allowing him to peer into the women’s section on the other side. Not the most egalitarian setup: a stark hallway and folding chairs. At the far end, a tatty purple curtain, drawn. The entrance to the garret, he assumed.
He trailed his fingers along soft stone walls, waiting for the significance of the place to kick in. This was the Maharal’s shul; that was his chair. Yet the scene was too familiar—familial—to evoke anything but weariness. The Holy Ark. The curtain, velvet and brocade. The Eternal Flame. Know before Whom you stand.
Jacob loved it and hated it, needed it and rejected it, for the same reasons.
What did it say about him, he wondered, that he couldn’t stir himself to awe? An aversion to commercialism?
Or a symptom of his own numbness?
Was he a cop, examining a crime scene? A Jew in a house of worship?
His soul caught in a tug-of-war, he squeezed into a cramped wooden pew, its seat scalloped by thousands of backsides.
A young woman in a Hollister T-shirt passed, arm in arm with her boyfriend. Jacob overheard her say, “They totally filmed The Bachelorette here.”
Unable to stand the tension, he leapt up like a man on the verge of vomiting, hurrying to the exit, pausing to fish out his wallet and tug free one of the hundred-dollar bills. He folded it in quarters and reached to poke it in the slot of the communal donations box, olive wood engraved with a single word.
Tzedek.
Justice.
And he stared and stared, because that wasn’t right, and then his mind snickered at him and he looked again and it read, as it should—
Tzedakah.
Charity.
He’d seen it wrong, because the final letter, heh, was rubbed smooth.
Because the lighting was bad.
Because he was hungover.
His eyesight—that could be starting to go, too.
“Excuse me, please.”
“Sorry,” Jacob mumbled. He crammed the money in the pushke and backed away. He’d fulfilled half of his mitzvah obligation to his father. Now all he had to do was get back to L.A. safely.
—
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, with still no word from Jan, Jacob decided to make good on another of Sam’s requests.
The old Jewish cemetery ran twelve layers deep. Whenever the community had run out of space, they’d simply piled on more dirt. Snaggletoothed stones rose from a lumpy swamp of leaves. A sagging chain restricted visitors to a perimeter path that wound past the major highlights. It was packed. Three times in twenty feet he stopped to answer kaddish.
Death tourism—a reliable boom industry.
The resting place of the Maharal had caused a snarl in the foot traffic. Jacob paddled to the middle of a group of Hasidic men and rose up on his toes for a better look. The tomb was carved from pink sandstone, its peaked shape faintly evocative of the Alt-Neu Shul.
Fitting; centuries later, place and man defined each other.
Pebbles and coins lined a ridge jutting below a carved lion, the Loew family crest. Loew shared a root with Leo. It was one of those things his father had told him again and again, which Jacob had absorbed without realizing. The guidebook added that the figure was also a reference to the coat of arms of Bohemia, which featured a two-tailed lion. Another Fun Sam Fact: the Maharal had been an acquaintance of the Emperor Rudolf II, who had invited the rabbi to court to discuss Kabbalah and mysticism.
Several misguided souls had stuck notes in the tombstone’s crevices: the gravely ill petitioning for health, the barren for children, and no doubt lots of folks seeking material wealth.
Jacob could hear his father’s admonishing voice.
You don’t pray to a man—any man.
Elbowing his way closer, he saw that the tomb was in fact double-width. On the left, the Maharal himself, whose epitaph declared him the great genius of Israel; on the right, his wife, lying at his side for eternity.
The righteous woman who contented.
Perel, the daughter of Reb Shmuel.
A woman of valor, the crown of her husband.
Strange form of praise. Content with what? Her lot in life? Her husband? A rabbinic dictum had it that the rich man is one who is happy with his portion, so perhaps Perel had been famously pleased.
For all the stories he’d heard about the Maharal, none mentioned anything about a wife. But of course she’d existed. Jewish scholars were encouraged to settle down early. That Perel shared a name with his mother—middle name; but still—made him smile and shake his head. Maybe that was what had attracted Sam to Bina in the first place. They were both women of valor. Standing before the tomb, it seemed less absurd to Jacob that his father continued to sing the Shabbat song. To love a dead woman was Sam’s right as much as it was his failure. The same could be said of Jacob’s unwillingness to forgive.
He crouched to pluck a pebble from the ground.
A beetle darted across his hand.
A startled shout burst from his throat, and he sprang back, crashing into one of the Hasidim and sending his camera flying. The Hasid began to scream at him in French, and Jacob apologized and snatched up his own camera from the dirt.
The beetle had meantime scampered back along the path; he spotted it in a bed of dry leaves, standing up on its hind legs, waving its black arms smugly.
Seized with rage, Jacob lunged for it, coming up with a handful of moist earth. He tried again, and again it danced back, and he began hobble-hopping after it, swimming upstream, worming his way through stocking legs and flip-flops and sensible shoes, raising screeches of disapproval.
The beetle flitted from stone to stone, its wings unfurling for one luminous instant and then vanishing into its black casing while it waited for him to catch up, its legs bent, poised to take flight.
He coiled to lunge again and hands grabbed hold of him, eight arms and four heads like some crazy Hasidic Vishnu, dragging him toward the exit, yelling curses in his ear in Yiddish and French. Jacob didn’t understand a word of it except for beheimah—animal.
Shoved through the cemetery gates, he found himself in the narrow road facing the Alt-Neu, where he had only just left, as though he was pinned to some monstrous creaking wheel.
He stumbled away, making turns at random, coming to a side street. In the privacy of a doorway he collapsed, trembling like a wet dog.
Bugs were in cemeteries. Bugs were everywhere.
The Creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles.
The worst part was realizing that he’d failed: he’d forgotten to place the stone.
His pocket buzzed and he jumped.
Incoming texts filled the screen: the severed head, shot at multiple angles. A phone number for the shul’s director of security, Peter Wichs.
The defaced, long-gone cobblestone.
Peter Wichs answered in Czech, but upon hearing Jacob’s voice he switched to a fluid, idiomatic English. They arranged to meet at the Alt-Neu at five-thirty, a
llowing an hour before services.
Jacob bought himself a Coke, drained it in four desperate gulps, and set out for the Pension Karlova.
—
HAVEL THE HOTEL MANAGER regarded the photos of the severed head with the resignation of a man who’s not only seen worse but has also scrubbed it out of carpeting. While he couldn’t definitively identify the head as belonging to the Brit who’d skipped out on his bill, he did agree to retrieve the guest registry, playing out his tale of woe with tragic brio.
“Who can do this? I am a good man, honest man, I pay taxes, I don’t cheat.”
The registration form listed a UK passport number, issued to one Reginald Heap; a London address; a credit card number.
“Decline,” Havel said. “I call police.”
Heap’s birthdate was given as 19 April 1966.
Right in the zone for the Creeper killings.
Hoping for hair or skin cells, Jacob asked Havel what he’d done with Heap’s belongings.
“Throw away.”
Crap. “Can I get a copy of his information?”
Havel pointed to Jacob’s phone. “Picture.”
“You want a picture.”
Havel nodded.
“With me?”
Havel frowned at him. “Head.”
“A picture—of the head?”
Havel nodded.
“I’m not sure I can do that.”
Havel slammed the registry shut.
“Come on,” Jacob said. He opened his wallet. “Let’s work this out another way.”
“Picture,” Havel insisted.
“You’re serious.”
Havel set his jaw and looked past Jacob.
“Fine, what’s your e-mail address?”
Once Havel had received the photo, he disappeared into a back room, gone for a solid fifteen minutes. Jacob dinged the bell, to no avail.
At last Havel returned. He handed Jacob a copy of the registration form and proudly displayed a black-and-white printout of the head, upon which he’d scrawled, in red marker, ten or so words in Czech.
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