“Eating dirt?” Jacob asked. “Or bathing in antiperspirant?”
“Either.”
Jacob said, “No.”
The resident seemed relieved. “I’m sure it’s a lab error. We’ll definitely keep an eye on it, though. Rest up.”
Jacob lay back, absently running his fingers over his scabbed arm. The taste of mud was faint in the back of his throat. He was thinking about Mai, and Divya Das, and his father saying to her Good to see you rather than Good to meet you.
He looked at Sam, inscrutable as always. “Abba? I think I’d like to sleep a little now.”
His father nodded. He reached for the Zohar. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Four days later, his blood had yet to normalize, but as he was reporting no obvious ill effects, neither the resident nor his insurance could justify keeping him in the hospital any longer. They gave him painkillers and a follow-up appointment. A nurse wheeled him to the curb and he hobbled on crutches to the waiting Taurus.
Nigel got out to hold the door for him. “Lookin good.”
“You should see the other guy.”
—
THE PLAN WAS to recuperate at Sam’s. They stopped by Jacob’s place to pick up clothes.
The Honda sat in the carport, looking somehow different. As Nigel helped him limp up the steps, Jacob realized what it was: for the first time in months, the car had been washed.
Jacob asked Nigel if he’d done it.
Nigel laughed. “Nope,” he said, fishing out Sam’s copy of the apartment key. “Maybe some girlfriend did you a favor.”
—
EVERYTHING SUBACH AND SCHOTT had brought—the desk, chair, computer, sat phone, camera, printer, router, battery pack—was gone. The TV had been restored to its original position and reconnected. The bookcase had been repatriated to the living room, the potter’s tools neatly arrayed on the shelves.
Also gone were Phil Ludwig’s boxes of evidence, along with the murder book Jacob had put together.
The bathroom smelled piney. The fridge had been purged. He didn’t own a vacuum cleaner but there were outfield stripes in the bedroom carpet. A zip-top bag on his nightstand contained his wallet, keys, and badge.
His old cell phone was plugged in, fully charged and getting five bars.
His backpack sat on the floor by the closet. He looked inside and saw his tefillin bag; a bunch of candy wrappers; his Glock and the magazine. They’d left him the binoculars, affixed with a Post-it, two words written in a whispery scrawl.
You’re welcome.
He had gotten used to the chaos. The reversion to form disoriented him. He packed hurriedly, stuffing items into a duffel. Nigel hoisted it over one shoulder, the backpack over the other, and went down to put them in the car. While he was gone, Jacob limped to the living room, stood at the bookcase, examining the tools. Combs, paddles, a wire cutter, a set of knives.
One of the knives, the longest one, was missing.
Nigel reappeared in the doorway to help him down the stairs. “Ready to go?”
“Hell yes,” Jacob said.
—
DOWNSTAIRS, a white work van was parked across the street.
CURTAINS AND BEYOND—DISCOUNT WINDOW TREATMENTS
An unfamiliar man sat in the driver’s seat. He was black, sitting up so tall that the top quarter of his head was out of view. He appeared not to pay them any attention, but as the Taurus eased into the street, Jacob raised a hand to him, and he waved back.
—
SAM INSISTED ON TAKING the pullout couch and giving Jacob his bed, and he proceeded to astonish Jacob by handing him the remote control for a brand-new thirty-inch flat-screen television on a stand.
“Since when do you have that?”
“I’m not a Luddite.”
“You hate TV.”
“You want to argue about it or you want to watch it?”
—
THE BARBITURATES CLEARED from his system within forty-eight hours, and withdrawal set in.
Sam watched from a chair by the bedside, a pained expression on his face, as Jacob shivered and leaked sweat. “We should go back to the hospital.”
“N—nnnn, not a ch—chance.”
“Jacob. Please.”
“Juh—just got to ri—ride it . . . out.”
His hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t lay his tefillin straight.
Sam said, “Don’t feel obliged because of me.”
“You want to argue about it,” Jacob stuttered, “or you want to help me?”
His father got up and cradled him from behind, wrapping the leather straps in evenly spaced coils. They were close against each other, Jacob’s nose pressed to Sam’s scratchy neck, and the smell of Irish Spring made him aware of his own, stale stink.
“I’m so sorry,” he mumbled.
Sam shushed him gently and reached for the head tefillin, smiling as he centered them between Jacob’s eyes.
“What,” Jacob said.
“I was remembering the first time I showed you how to do this,” Sam said. He adjusted the box to the left. “How big they looked on you. No more talking, please.”
Flat on his back, Jacob recited an abridged service, getting through as many of the core recitations as he could manage before the prayer book slipped from his hands.
Delicately, Sam lifted Jacob’s head off the pillow and loosened the tefillin. He removed them; removed the arm tefillin. He fetched a cold towel and sponged down Jacob’s forehead, soothing the spot where the leather box had bitten into his skin.
—
TREMORS YIELDED to low-grade headache and fatigue, the harbingers of a coming downturn in his mood, emotional nausea to go along with the physical kind. Sam appeared to sense the change, too. He responded by seeking to fill the hours with mild distractions, idle chatter and endless streams of riddles and puns.
Jacob doubted he could stave off full-blown depression with word games, but it was hard not to be charmed somewhat by his father’s enthusiasm for providing care rather than accepting it. It had been a long time since he’d seen how Sam actually lived, and the self-sufficiency his father demonstrated was eye-opening.
Shuffling to and from the kitchen, ferrying tuna fish sandwiches and Gatorade and ice packs, going to the bathroom to rewet the compress or wash out the puke bucket.
Knowing the TV set had been bought for him, Jacob tried to show his appreciation by sticking to programming his father might conceivably enjoy: sports and news. They lamented the Lakers’ early exit from the playoffs, watched baseball without comment. Sam studied while Jacob dozed. Jacob’s major accomplishment of the first week was summoning the energy to call Volpe, Band, and Flores to relay the good news. Grandmaison he didn’t bother with. Let him figure it out on his own.
—
WHEN HE FELT WELL ENOUGH, he and Sam began going out for long, slow walks, building up to three times daily, their tempo set by the drilling pain in Jacob’s leg. Along the way they would encounter neighborhood folks, many of whom greeted Sam by name. A soft-bodied woman pursuing a pair of rambunctious grandchildren; a young father wrestling with a stroller. It was as if they owed Sam a great debt of gratitude, as if the weight of his existence lessened theirs, and Jacob thought of Abe Teitelbaum’s refrain about his father being a lamed-vavnik.
On a Thursday evening, near the corner of Airdrome and Preuss, a girl on a bicycle called to them as she whipped by.
“Hi, Mr. Lev.”
Sam raised a hand.
“Popular guy,” Jacob said.
“Everybody loves a clown,” Sam said.
For his part, his father gave no indication of being burdened. Jacob reckoned that had to be true. If you thought you were a lamed-vavnik, you couldn’t be a lamed-vavnik. The reason for that we
nt beyond a lack of the requisite humility. A lamed-vavnik could never recognize the immensity of his obligation, because the instant he did, the crush of worldly sorrow he was required to bear would paralyze him.
Jacob glanced back at the girl, her pigtails streaming. “Who was that, anyway?”
“How should I know? I’m blind.”
—
THEY TURNED DOWN AIRDROME STREET.
Jacob said, “Do you remember we used to have our Sunday morning study sessions?”
“Certainly I remember,” Sam said.
“I have no idea what you were thinking, exposing me to some of that stuff.”
“What did I expose you to?”
“You taught me about capital punishment when I was six.”
“In a purely legalistic sense.”
“I’m not sure a first grader can reliably make that distinction.”
“Is this where you tell me how I’ve ruined your life?”
“You haven’t ruined my life,” Jacob said. “I take sole credit for that.”
At Robertson Boulevard, the orange and green 7-Eleven sign loomed in the twilight, firing up Jacob’s cravings for bourbon and nitrates.
“Can we turn around?” he asked. “It’s too noisy here.”
“Of course. Are you getting tired?”
“Another couple blocks,” Jacob said.
They walked east.
“Abba? Can I ask you something else?”
Sam nodded.
“Did you know Ema was sick when you married her?”
Sam said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“It’s all right. I’m not angry. I’m thinking about it, because I want to say it right.”
They walked in silence a moment.
“Let’s consider the question from another perspective. If I could go back, would I do it again? And the answer to that is, yes, without a doubt.”
“Even knowing what happened to her?”
“You marry someone for who they are, not who they could become.”
In the silence, Jacob’s crutches scraped the pavement.
You can live inside your experiences or outside of them.
He was having trouble choosing.
He was having trouble deciding if that was an authentic choice, or an illusion.
“I worry that it’s going to happen to me,” he said. “I worry that it’s happening already.”
“You’re a different person, Jacob.”
“That doesn’t make me exempt.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“So what makes you so sure?”
“Because I know you,” Sam said. “And I know what you’re made of.”
It had begun to get dark.
Jacob said, “I was thinking, maybe, we could try it again sometime, learning together.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Pick something interesting. I’m sure as soon as I get back they’re going to slam me with a bunch of busywork, so, I can’t promise my attendance will be perfect. But I’m up for it if you are.”
“I’d like that,” Sam said. “Very much.”
At La Cienega, traffic reared up. They retreated westward. It took them twenty minutes to make it back to the house. Sam didn’t seem too put out; for the moment, at least, they’d found a mutually agreeable pace.
—
IT FELT WRONG to tell Phil Ludwig over the phone. On a Sunday morning, Nigel picked Jacob up and they drove down to San Diego, where they found the good D crouched in his front yard, optimistically installing geraniums beneath the inland heat.
Ludwig stood, blinking sweat out of his eyes. “This is either gonna be a real great day or a real fucking bad one.”
Over lemonade, Jacob recapped the events and the evidence, lapsing into generalities in describing Richard Pernath’s final moments. Ludwig listened stonily. In his curt verdict—“Good”—Jacob saw an honorable effort to conceal disappointment. His success made Ludwig’s failure official.
“I haven’t talked to any of the families yet. I was hoping you’d be able to help me out with that. Not the Steins. Them, I’d like to speak to myself.”
Ludwig said, “Let me think about it.” Then, perking up, he said, “I got something for you, too. When you e-mailed, it reminded me I never gave you an answer about that bug.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Fuck don’t worry about it. I was up half the night. You’re gonna pretend to be interested.”
Out in the garage, Ludwig cleared the tabletop of the work in progress, a pristine tiger moth mounted on a bright white mat. He took down a crumbling, acid-ravaged reference book.
“I forgot I even had this,” he said, stroking the warped cover, red cloth stamped in black.
Insecta Evropae
A. M. GOLDFINCH
“I picked it up years ago, at a library sale. I don’t think I bothered checking it before cause it’s Old World species.”
He had bookmarked the entry with a color printout of one of Jacob’s photos. He aligned it with a pen-and-ink illustration of Nicrophorus bohemicus, the Bohemian burying beetle.
Jacob crowded the table to read.
Found along the riverbanks of central and eastern Europe, N. bohemicus, like other burying beetles, displayed a behavior unusual in the insect world: mates remained together to rear their young. In the Bohemian, the tendency was pronounced, with couples pairing for life.
“Here’s the thing,” Ludwig said. “This book’s from 1909. I looked online for a color photo and Wikipedia comes back that the species went extinct in the mid-1920s.”
Jacob continued to stare at the images—to his eyes, identical creatures.
“You’ve got to remember,” Ludwig said, “insects, it’s hard to say that definitively. They’re small, they live underground, and most people see em and just want to smash em. There’s this beetle from the Mediterranean nobody’s seen in a hundred years, and last year it turned up in the south of England. So, it happens. My thought was we pass this along to my friend. If he agrees, maybe then we go to one of the journals.”
“Go for it,” said Jacob. “No need to include me.”
Ludwig frowned. “They’ll want to know who’s making the claim.”
“Tell them you took the picture yourself.”
“I shouldn’t do that.”
“You’re the one figured it out,” Jacob said. “I never would’ve known.”
After mulling over whether there was condescension in this offer, Ludwig nodded. “Fair enough. You’re sure?”
“Couldn’t be surer.”
—
THE STEINS WELCOMED HIM at their mansion. Jacob was concerned they would react badly to the news that the men who had murdered their daughter would never face trial. Rhoda sprang up and ran from the room, and Eddie tottered toward Jacob with his hands up. Jacob braced to block an uppercut, but Eddie wrapped him in a bear hug, and Rhoda returned carrying a bottle of champagne and three flutes.
“You see?” Eddie told her, shaking him. “I said all along he wasn’t such a schmuck.”
—
BUYING GIFTS FOR SAM, a man with zero material lust, had never been easy, and it had gotten more challenging as Jacob grew up and realized that his father never wore ties. To thank him for the extended stay, Jacob settled on making him a Sabbath meal, the last before he returned to work.
Making his way through a slice of store-bought chocolate cake, Sam said, “Delicious.”
“Thanks, Abba.”
“I’m sure you’re ready to be back in your own bed. Don’t be a stranger, though.”
“I can’t,” Jacob said. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
—
WHEN HE GOT HOME, the curtain installer’s van was there; the same man sat behind the wheel, reading.
Jacob waved to get his attention. The man closed his magazine and lowered the window.
“Look, I don’t know what your shift schedule is, if it’s always going to be you out here, but I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Jacob.”
“Nathaniel,” the man said.
“You want a drink or something?”
Nathaniel chuckled. “I’m all set, thanks.”
“Okay. You change your mind, just come by.”
Nathaniel smiled and saluted and buzzed the window up.
—
MARCIA IN TRAFFIC SAID, “How was Hawaii?”
Jacob pried open a box of Bics. “I wasn’t in Hawaii.”
“Vegas?” She leaned over his desk. “Cabo?”
Jacob shook his head and stood the pens in a mug.
“I know you’ve been somewhere,” she said. “You have that glow.”
He laughed.
“Fine,” she said, pouting. “Be that way.”
“Love to tell you, but there’s nothing to tell,” he said.
“Top secret,” she said.
“Smart woman.” He grinned.
She grinned back. “Well, I’m glad to have you back.”
“Thanks, hon.”
“Lev,” a man’s voice barked.
He looked up. Across the squad room, red as a fire hydrant with inflammatory bowel disease, stood his old boss, Captain Mendoza.
Marcia muttered, “Meet the new czar.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I need you in my office,” Mendoza called.
From R-H to Traffic was quite a fall. Jacob knew from personal experience. “Who’d he piss off?”
“We haven’t figured it out yet,” Marcia said. “Any guesses?”
“Lev. Did you hear me?”
“Right away, sir,” Jacob called. To Marcia: “I might have one or two.”
Mendoza had ducked back into his office and was sitting with his feet up, flipping through a four-inch binder. Jacob could see the work of stress: ten lost pounds, dark half-moons beneath the eyes, scattered pimples. The mustache, usually trimmed with precision, lay crooked.
The Golem of Hollywood Page 45
