The Golem of Hollywood Read online

That was the theory. Invariably, Sam ended up giving the books away to anyone who showed the slightest interest, trying, unsuccessfully, to reimburse Abe out of his own pocket.

  As Sam launched into a summary of the latest work, his elegant pianist fingers flying, Jacob fixed on a smile and set his head on auto-nod. He’d heard most of the ideas before, or some version of them. His father considered Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, his cardinal commentator, and had been talking and writing about him as long as Jacob could remember. The guy could do no wrong. The guy had special powers. The guy was the gadol hador—the greatest Torah mind of his generation. He was a lamed-vavnik, one of the thirty-six hidden righteous men who sustained the world. He was Abraham and Einstein and Babe Ruth and the Green Lantern rolled into one, at once mythical and intimate, like some highly exotic fruit hanging off the far end of the family tree; the fourth cousin who never shows up to reunions because he’s building affordable solar-powered housing in Guatemala or pearl diving off Sri Lanka, and whose absence turns him into the sole topic of conversation.

  One of the few recollections Jacob had of Bina showing a maternal instinct was when Sam decided to read to him from a book about the Maharal’s creation of the golem of Prague. The cover art featured a monster with glowing, jaundiced eyes, stretching a bearish hand after some hapless, unseen victim. It had scared the bejesus out of Jacob, then four or five. He’d run in his pajamas to Bina, who gathered him up and turned on Sam ferociously.

  Read him a normal book, like a normal child.

  In hindsight, it did seem a questionable choice for a bedtime story.

  A shrill electronic plaint interrupted his thoughts and paused Sam’s monologue. Jacob fumbled out the sat phone. He was sure he’d turned it off. He flicked the ringer switch, but the phone shrieked a second time.

  “You should get that,” Sam said.

  Jacob flicked the switch back. The goddamned thing kept ringing. “It can wait.”

  “It might be important.”

  Hot with shame, Jacob tripped through the cardboard maze, stepped out to the patio.

  “Hello?”

  “Detective Lev? Phil Ludwig.”

  “Oh—hi.”

  “I’m catching you at a bad time?”

  “No, it’s, it’s fine,” Jacob said, eyeing Sam through the ragged lace curtain. His father had laid his cutlery across the edge of his plate and was sitting with his hands crossed on his shallow stomach, gazing placidly into oblivion. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “Yeah. What can I do for you?”

  “I caught a case that relates to one of your old ones, and I wanted to pick your brains.”

  “What case would that be?”

  “The Night Creeper,” Jacob said.

  Ludwig said nothing for a solid ten seconds. When he next spoke, his tone was guarded—close to hostile. “Is that a fact.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “Relates how?”

  “I think I may have your offender,” Jacob said.

  Ludwig exhaled. It sounded labored.

  “Detective?” Jacob asked.

  “One second.”

  The phone clattered down, and Jacob heard grunting, like the guy had accidentally swallowed a cigarette butt.

  “Detective? You okay?”

  Ludwig came back on. “Yeah.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Well—I mean, Christ. I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “I was hoping to swing by and talk to you,” Jacob said.

  “You have him? I—shit. I thought you were gonna tell me you had another DB.”

  “I do,” Jacob said. “Your offender.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ludwig said. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wouldn’t kid about that. Tomorrow okay?”

  They arranged to meet at eleven a.m. Before they got off, Jacob again asked if Ludwig was feeling well.

  “Don’t worry about me. Listen up: you’d better not be yanking my chain here.”

  “Hand to God,” Jacob said.

  “Cause you are, I’ll break your fucking neck,” Ludwig said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I apologize,” Jacob said, reseating himself. “It’s this new phone. I tried to silence it, but for some reason it won’t turn off. Anyhow, sorry. I hate to disrupt your Shabbos.”

  “You’re not. It’s absolutely permitted. Your work is no different from a doctor’s.”

  “Nobody’s going to die if I don’t answer the phone.”

  “Can you say that with certainty?”

  “In this case, yes.” Jacob resumed eating, noticing that Sam hadn’t taken more than a couple bites of his own food. “Abba? You’re not sick, are you?”

  “Me? No. Why? Do I look sick?”

  “You’d tell me if you were.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve barely eaten.”

  “Have I?” Sam squinted at his plate. “I guess I got distracted.”

  “You were telling me about the Maharal.”

  “Enough about that. I don’t want to spoil the ending.” Sam’s smile acknowledged the absurdity of Jacob—of anyone—reading his book. “I’d much rather hear about you.”

  “Not much to tell. Busy.”

  “So I gather. Anything exciting?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I asked.” Sam’s dim left eye winked. “Although maybe I’m just being polite.”

  Jacob laughed. “Touché. Well, all right. I’m not sure how much I should discuss.”

  “As much as you want,” Sam said.

  “Right,” Jacob said. For the first time in his career, his work touched upon Sam’s area of expertise, however tangentially. To say nothing felt artificially tight-lipped, almost unjust. “This homicide I’ve got, it’s a weird one.”

  “Homicide,” Sam said.

  Jacob nodded.

  “I thought you’d been reassigned.”

  “They re-reassigned me.”

  “I see,” Sam said. He didn’t sound pleased. He began pushing slices of cucumber around, rearranging them into a watery green mosaic. “And?”

  “And . . . so, they put me on this because they found some Hebrew letters at the scene.”

  A silence.

  “That’s,” Sam said, “that’s unusual.”

  “No sh—no kidding.”

  “What did the letters say,” Sam said.

  “Tzedek.”

  Another silence.

  “You’re still not eating,” Jacob said.

  Sam put down the fork. “Is that what the call was about?”

  “My case is connected to an old one. The victim has an ugly past.”

  “How ugly?”

  Jacob shifted. “I shouldn’t . . . I mean. Pretty ugly. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “And now someone killed him,” Sam said. “To render justice.”

  “That’s more or less the size of it. To be honest, the whole thing makes me kind of uncomfortable.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I don’t want my avenger to turn out to be Jewish,” Jacob said. “It’s not like I’m responsible for him, but . . . You know.”

  “And if he is Jewish?”

  “If he is, then he is. Follow the argument, wherever it leads.”

  Sam appeared not to notice Jacob quoting him back to himself. “If you can’t be objective,” he said, “you should recuse yourself.”

  “I didn’t say I can’t be objective.”

  “It sounds to me like you have doubts.”

  “A decision I can make for myself, thanks. Anyway, he might not be Jewish, just trying to leave that impression.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sam said. “You said you were done with Homicide.”

>   “I told you. They asked me to come back. Ordered me, actually.”

  Sam said nothing.

  “Abba. What’s wrong.”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Look,” Jacob said, “I’m not going to beg you.”

  “I’m remembering how unhappy you were,” Sam said.

  Jacob had made an effort to hide his depression, and now he bridled, feeling caught out. “I’m fine.”

  “It wasn’t good for you,” Sam said.

  “Leave it alone, please.”

  “You can’t ask them to find someone else?”

  “No. I can’t. They want me precisely because I’m Jewish. Seriously, I don’t want to discuss it anymore, all right? It’s a done deal and it’s not Shabbos table talk.”

  Sam had often used the same rationale to block an objectionable topic of conversation; as before, he gave no sign of recognition. He nodded abstractedly, blinked, smiled. “Dessert?”

  —

  SECONDS AND THIRDS of tea and cake left Jacob groaning. “I surrender.”

  “But look how much is left.”

  “There’s no obligation to eat the entire thing in one shot.”

  “I’m going to make you a doggie bag,” Sam said.

  “Not a chance. You keep it for the week.”

  “I’ll never finish all that,” Sam said. “You have to do your share.”

  “I think my share was done with my fourth piece of kugel.”

  “Shall we bentsch?”

  “Sure.”

  Sam passed him a small prayer booklet, a white satin cover stamped with blue letters.

  Bar Mitzvah of

  Jacob Meir Lev

  AUGUST 21, 1993

  “Old school,” Jacob said.

  Sam fluttered his fingers in the direction of the library. “I have a box of them sitting around somewhere.”

  “They belong in a museum.” Of apostasy.

  They recited the grace after meals.

  “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Thank you for taking the time . . . But Jacob? I meant what I said, before. You shouldn’t minimize the importance of what you do. It’s an ancient calling. It’s in your Bar Mitzvah section. ‘Shoftim v’shotrim.’”

  “Judges and policemen. Hey, maybe I should’ve been a jurist instead. Give you bragging rights, ‘my son the Supreme Court Justice.’”

  “I’m proud of what you are.”

  Jacob said nothing.

  “You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” It was the first time he could remember his father expressing an opinion, positive or negative, about his line of work. Lev family culture didn’t foster typical professional-class expectations, but neither did it encourage a cop’s life, and Jacob assumed that his choice had made for a source of disappointment, similar to his loss of faith.

  Now the burst of earnestness made him squirm, and he steered the conversation away. “Here’s a question for you. The case got me wondering about the idea that justice and charity spring from the same root. Tzedek and tzedakah.”

  “That’s true in an imperfect world.”

  “Ah?” Jacob said. “Say better.”

  “What we call justice is a creation of human beings, and since we ourselves are creations, limited by definition, what we create is flawed. There’s an enormous difference between Godly judgment and man’s version. You might call it the defining difference. Human justice, like every aspect of this world, is tailored to meet our needs and suit our capabilities. In a sense, it’s the opposite of pure justice . . .”

  Jacob listened with half an ear as Sam got himself worked up into a rhythm. There was a reason his father was the rabbi and he the cop, and while it would be reductive to say that his career path had been forged in opposition to Sam’s airy worldview, a childhood bent over books, both secular and religious, had lent allure to the notion of getting one’s hands dirty.

  “. . . perceive as opposites in this world, for example justice and mercy, are in fact unities in the mind of God—it goes without saying that I mean that metaphorically—which, speaking of, relates to what I was saying earlier, about dialectical truth . . .”

  Jacob could appreciate now that his mother must have felt the same way. In her case, the urge to escape into concreteness was literal: he remembered her fingernails, edged with brown clay that would dry and flake off in little crescent moons. A tiny accidental cosmos, accumulating in the linen closet, the pantry, waiting for the day she cleaned up the house and herself, a day that never came, so that Jacob would eventually lose patience and get out the vacuum himself.

  He was both of them, neither of them—a phenomenon no less mysterious for its frequency.

  Sam paused. “I’m prattling again.”

  “No, no . . .”

  “I am, I can see you.”

  “See what.”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “I can’t smile because I’m happy?”

  “I’d love for you to be happy,” Sam said. “Nothing would make me happier. But I’m not sure that’s why you’re smiling.”

  “What you just said is very you.”

  “Who else would I be?”

  Jacob laughed.

  “At any rate. It’s good that we never face real judgment in this world. No man could withstand the scrutiny of the Divine gaze. Every last one of us would melt like wax before fire.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to think about what I’m in for when I die,” Jacob said.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in any of that,” Sam said.

  He said it so casually that it took Jacob a moment to grasp the import of what he was being confronted with. He said, “I don’t know what I believe.”

  Sam’s eyes creased behind his sunglasses. “It’s a start,” he said. “Now let me go fix you that doggie bag.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He’d had too much to eat: his dreams blew in strong, almost sickeningly tactile. It was the garden again, and Mai again, receding as he pursued her, locking him in infinite desire.

  He woke up drenched, looked down, and saw that he’d been masturbating in his sleep.

  He rose groggily to finish the job in the bathroom.

  Couldn’t manage it. Tried to conjure her face.

  No use: she vaporized.

  Tried instead to conjure up some of his greatest hits.

  No use.

  He sat on the edge of the tub, watching his penis wilt in his hand. Turn on the TV, and ad after ad made it sound like it was a perfectly normal problem, for any man, at any age. But it was a new experience for him, and he didn’t like it in the slightest.

  He took the coldest shower he could stand.

  —

  BY EIGHT-THIRTY HE WAS on the road to San Diego, a gas station burrito stuffed in the cup holder, fiddling with the stations to drown out reverberations of confusion and shame.

  For once the freeway lived up to its name: he cruised, arriving at the Point Loma Marina fifteen minutes early. He parked and got out and took in a chestful of brine and diesel. Across the harbor, the Coronado Bridge threaded through the fog; a naval destroyer lay in for repairs. Gulls circled tauntingly. Jacob bent over the splattered call box to punch in Ludwig’s number, willing the D to hurry up before he got bombed.

  Ludwig’s boat was a twenty-five-foot weekend cruiser named Pension Plan. On deck stood a keg-chested man in his early sixties, blond hair leached to white, a blue Hawaiian shirt open three buttons deep, exposing a rooster-red V of sunburnt flesh. He’d kept his stache, yellowed at the fringe by nicotine.

  They shook hands and went below, occupying opposite ends of a garishly upholstered banquette set with watery iced tea.

  “Clean swap,” Jacob said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve got and hopefully we can both cl
ose.”

  “You first.”

  Jacob had expected as much. He read Ludwig’s skepticism as a product of having been burned before by similar claims. He wanted to help almost as much as he needed help in return.

  All the same, he had his own territory to protect, and he cherry-picked in describing the scene, leaving out most of the bizarro elements and making the crime sound like a run-of-the-mill rage killing.

  “I wondered what he did to piss someone off that bad,” Jacob said. “Now I know.”

  Ludwig’s fingers worked thoughtfully.

  “Don’t go sniffing around those families,” he said. “They’ve been through enough.”

  Jacob let that pass. “Did you ever work up a suspect profile?”

  “FBI gave us their opinion. White male, twenty to fifty, intelligent but underemployed, trouble with interpersonal relationships, meticulous. The usual garbage. I always did think that was—I mean, wow. ‘Trouble with interpersonal relationships.’ That is . . . that is insightful. That is some superb fuckin analysis, right there. ‘Trouble with . . .’” He shook his head. “Whatever. Any of that fit your guy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who my guy is.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  Jacob showed him a photo of the head; Ludwig whistled. “Ouch.”

  “Bells?”

  “Nobody we ever talked to.”

  “He couldn’t’ve been that meticulous,” Jacob said. “He left behind DNA.”

  “Not too many guys thinking about that in 1988,” Ludwig said.

  He stared at the photo, momentarily transported. Then he sagged disappointedly.

  “Well, he’s white,” he said, tossing it down. “They got that much right.”

  “Who was the original D?”

  “They had a whole big R-H task force, but the lead was a guy by the name of Howie O’Connor. Maybe you heard of him?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Grade-A prick. Good cop, though. They forced him out a couple of years after the task force folded. Some witness claims he felt her up, they tell him take a hike pending investigation. A week later, he eats a bullet. Sad stuff.”

  “What was his theory?”

  “Far as I know, he didn’t have one, or not a strong one. I never talked to him directly. I only know what was in the file, and O’Connor wasn’t the kind who made up stories to fit his assumptions. The general consensus was a drifter, a guy who moves around without anyone ever really seeing him. Remember, this is happening right around the time they nailed Richard Ramirez. People see what they’re conditioned to see.”