The Golem of Paris Read online

  FOR THE NEXT YEAR, he went back to what was left of his life.

  He drank. He ignored his father’s pleading calls.

  He hunched at his skimpy desk in Valley Traffic, typing up accident reports.

  Then, on a dull December morning, a shadow stretched across his keyboard.

  Without looking up, Jacob discerned the soaring point of the chin, the spindly frame. He anticipated the weary voice, eternally on the verge of losing patience.

  Commander Mike Mallick said, “Afternoon, Detective. What’re we busy with?”

  A midday drop-in was a far cry from the cloak-and-dagger of their first encounter, in a vacant Hollywood warehouse with a bogus address.

  Jacob supposed they were past the point of theatrics.

  “Hit-and-run,” he said.

  “Who’s the vic?”

  “Brand-new parking meter.”

  “High priority.”

  “You said it, sir.”

  “Not too busy for lunch, I hope.”

  At that, Jacob raised his head.

  Mallick had on aviator sunglasses and a lightweight suit, yards of gray crêpe in the legs alone. The silver tufts above his ears had thinned, like shed plumage. The necktie was interesting: no ten-dollar dry-cleaner special but a wispy charcoal snippet more befitting a wannabe screenwriter.

  “New look, sir?”

  Mallick smiled wanly. “Adapt or die.”

  • • •

  THEY CLIMBED INTO THE BACKSEAT of a white Town Car. The air-conditioning was going full-bore. Jacob felt his eyebrows crackling as he leaned forward to clap the driver on the shoulder. “Looking good, man. Svelte.”

  “Trying.” Detective Mel Subach patted his abundant gut. “Where to, sir?”

  Mallick said to Jacob, “What’s your pleasure, Detective?”

  “Is Special Projects paying?” Jacob asked.

  “We always do.”

  Jacob named a place on Ventura, a former greasy spoon refurbished by a pair of homesick Israelis. They’d kept the décor and overhauled the menu, serving up aromatic Middle Eastern fare to dark-skinned businessmen wearing large watches, and bewildered matrons who’d come in seeking a Cobb salad.

  Subach stayed behind in the car while Jacob followed Mallick inside. The Commander strode past the WAIT TO BE SEATED sign, folding himself into a purple pleather booth and asking for recommendations. But after Jacob had ordered shakshuka, extra hot, Mallick closed his menu. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  The waitress rolled her eyes and departed.

  “You’re missing out,” Jacob said.

  “I had a big breakfast.”

  “I thought you’d like this place, sir. It’s kosher.”

  “How thoughtful of you. You do know I’m Methodist.”

  “I didn’t, sir.”

  Mallick smiled. “You’ve started keeping kosher, then?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Well. To each his own.”

  “I’m pretty sure you know my eating habits, sir. You have eyes on me twenty-four/seven.”

  “They don’t search your fridge.”

  “They don’t have to. I come home every night with hot dogs.”

  Mallick shrugged. “Those could be kosher hot dogs.”

  “From 7-Eleven?”

  Mallick touched one silver temple. “The reports aren’t that detailed.”

  Jacob laughed. “I appreciate the candor, sir. Nice change of pace.”

  The waitress brought Jacob’s Diet Coke and a cup of ice water for Mallick.

  She was pretty, with a no-nonsense ponytail and slender, muscular forearms that stretched to set out a small dish of pickled vegetables.

  Jacob watched her disappear into the kitchen. “May I ask a question, sir? What are you hoping to accomplish? Your guys use the same unmarkeds over and over. It’s the same cast of characters. I know you’re there,” he said. “And if I know, Mai knows.”

  “That may very well be.”

  “So who do you think you’re fooling?”

  Mallick raised his eyebrows. “I’m not trying to fool anyone.”

  “It’s a waste of resources.”

  “I’ll make that call, Detective.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I meant no disrespect.”

  “Sooner or later,” Mallick said, “she’ll be back.”

  “And you’ll be ready to grab her.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  Jacob shrugged.

  The Commander hinged forward at the waist. “I shouldn’t have to convince you. You witnessed it yourself.”

  Jacob stifled a giddy laugh, remembering a horse-sized beetle exploding through a greenhouse roof.

  Convulsions in the glittering dark.

  A monstrous block of dirt.

  Then: a sculpted female form, perfect.

  The taste of mud flowing down his throat.

  A bleeding gash on his arm cauterizing itself.

  A black speck vanishing in the night sky.

  Forever.

  He said, “I’m still trying to figure out what I saw.”

  “I’m not asking you to take anything on faith,” Mallick said. “I’m asking you to trust yourself.”

  “With respect, sir, that’s the last thing I’m inclined to do.”

  Silence.

  Mallick said, “How long since you went to a meeting? Talked to your sponsor?”

  “Is this an intervention, sir?”

  “It’s me asking if you’re okay.”

  Jacob stirred his soda. They could seem so sincere. Mallick, Subach. Even Schott.

  What disturbed him wasn’t that they seemed sincere.

  It was that they were sincere, utterly convinced of their own righteousness.

  Fighting the urge to bolt, he smiled at the waitress as she put out two sunny-side-up eggs wallowing in tomato sauce, a stack of warm pita bread for sopping. Shakshuka had been a favorite since his year in Israel as a seminary student. Normally, he’d have been salivating. His stomach had contracted to a hard sour walnut. “Todah,” he said.

  “B’teyavon,” the waitress said, and she left.

  Mallick adjusted his sunglasses. “I’d much prefer if we could trust each other. We both want the same things.”

  “No kidding,” Jacob said. “You want a pony, too?”

  “I’m trying to make amends, Detective. How do you like life in Traffic?”

  “It’s dandy.”

  “I recall you saying that once before. I didn’t believe you then, either.”

  Here it comes Jacob thought.

  Returning to active duty raised issues he didn’t want to begin to think about. The booze weight he’d shed during his convalescence was creeping back. He slept badly, waking with skull-splitting headaches from recurrent nightmares about tall men wielding knives, dust-choked attics.

  A garden, lush, impenetrable.

  He didn’t feel stable enough to tackle any crime more daunting than assault with intent to inflict grievous harm on a parking meter.

  Mallick said, “What I’ve got lined up for you—”

  “Let’s say, hypothetically, I don’t want to take what you’ve got lined up.”

  “Mind your tone, Detective. I’m still your superior.” Mallick reset his patience. “Here’s a question for you. How many murders did we have last year?”

  “About three hundred.”

  “How many in 1992?”

  Crack, gang wars, race riots, an era of acute dividedness in a city where the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was a kind of perverse civic centerpiece.

  In 1992, Jacob had been twelve. He said, “More than three hundred.”

  “Two thousand five hundred eighty-nine.”

  Jacob wh
istled.

  “Of those, how many remain unsolved?” Mallick asked.

  “A lot.”

  “Correct.”

  “All right,” Jacob said. “Which one do I get?”

  “All of them,” Mallick said.

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir.”

  “You’re not going to solve them. They’re hopeless.”

  Jacob rubbed one eye, chuckled. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir.”

  “As of January first, we’re required to begin converting our archives from hard copy to digital. Everything after ’85 needs to be scanned. State-mandated.”

  This was how Special Projects sought to make amends? Glorified secretarial duty? He was already a desk jockey, had his cubicle organized just the way he liked it, no photos, no cartoons, no funny mugs. Bourbon in the bottom right drawer.

  “Hire a grad student, sir. They’re cheap.”

  “Can’t. Technically, these cases are still open. It needs to be a cop.”

  “It doesn’t need to be me.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy it.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You’re a Harvard man,” Mallick said. “Consider it learning for learning’s sake.”

  Jacob laughed and shook his head, picked up his utensils and cut cleanly through one of the eggs. Thick golden yolk oozed out.

  Mallick said, “We’ll set you up with everything you need.”

  “First I want you to do something for me.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, Detective.”

  “Call off your guys, please.”

  Mallick remained impassive.

  Jacob said, “We both know Mai won’t show herself as long as they’re in place.”

  “They’re not disturbing you,” Mallick said.

  “You want me to trust you? Trust me.”

  Mallick fooled with his skinny tie. “I’ll think about it.”

  “I appreciate it, sir.”

  “In the meantime, if she does come back, you know what to do.”

  Statement, not a question. It saved Jacob from having to lie. He tore off a piece of pita and swiped it through sauce. “I had a knife,” he said.

  Mallick said nothing.

  “A potter’s knife. It belonged to my mother. It disappeared after Schott and Subach came to redecorate my place.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Mallick said.

  “I’d like it back.”

  Mallick said, “You’ll start after the New Year.” He tossed down a hundred-dollar bill. “Take your time. I’ll be outside.”

  • • •

  ALONE, JACOB FINISHED HIS LUNCH at a leisurely pace. When the waitress came to collect his plate, he smelled za’atar and perspiration.

  “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

  He tamped down the impulse to ask for her number.

  It had been a long, long time.

  More than two years.

  But he remembered another night in his apartment, with an extremely ordinary woman whose name he never learned. They hadn’t even made it to the bedroom. They were drunk, and naked on the kitchen floor, and the instant he went inside her, she seized to stone, her eyes rolling back in her head, not from pleasure but agony.

  It felt like you were stabbing me.

  And he remembered another night shortly thereafter, in England, a woman whose name he still thought about, because she had a nice soft face and a laugh to match. He remembered her body, welcoming his, and then the same poison. He remembered her huddled on her bed, shaking, fearing for her own sanity as she described what she’d seen.

  She was beautiful.

  She looked angry.

  She looked jealous.

  She was describing Mai.

  The best he could do for any ordinary woman was to leave her alone.

  “Coffee?” the waitress asked. “Dessert?”

  “Piece of baklava to go,” he said. “For my friend on a diet.”

  She brought it in a foam container, along with a bill for nineteen dollars. Jacob left the entire hundred and went out to the car.

  • • •

  WHEN HE GOT HOME that afternoon, the surveillance van was gone from his block.

  The thrill of liberation was tempered by the realization that he was once again working for Mike Mallick. One way or another, Special Projects owned him.

  He climbed the stairs to his apartment, where his answering machine blinked.

  Jacob, it’s me—

  He hit DELETE, snapping his father’s voice clean off.

  Outside, dusk was gathering, streetlights glowing, moths and mayflies congregating, a pulsing vortex that raised in him an unsettling tide of nausea and arousal.

  He yanked the curtains shut.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The night before he began work at the August M. Vollmer Memorial Archive, Jacob went to Wikipedia to learn about its namesake.

  Vollmer, it emerged, began as Chief of Police in Berkeley, introducing novel concepts like centralized records and the hiring of minorities. He had formalized criminal justice education and been among the first to equip his men with motorized vehicles. Flush with success, bursting with optimism, he’d come to Los Angeles in 1923 and promptly burned out, quitting after a year and returning to Northern California, where he later committed suicide.

  Jacob shut the browser, wondering why anyone would choose to commemorate a guy whose career essentially proved what a shit-show LAPD was.

  The next day, standing in a forlorn corner of the hangar, he took stock of his new digs and smiled without a trace of glee. He had his answer.

  Rickety laminate desk. Rusty folding chair. Rusty gooseneck lamp. A black rotary telephone capable of inflicting blunt force trauma; a scratched scanner; a balky desktop with no Internet connection.

  The archive was a repository for schmucks.

  His Project was Special in the same way that certain Needs were Special.

  We’ll set you up with everything you need.

  Not quite.

  Jacob left the building, returning a couple hours later with a space heater, a gallon thermos of coffee, and four handles of Beam.

  Adapt or die.

  • • •

  DESPITE THE MAKE-WORK NATURE of the assignment, he rapidly developed a taste for the solitude. Mallick didn’t care about hours, as long as Jacob covered ground, and it suited him to show up when he felt like it and leave when he couldn’t take any more.

  He pulled down boxes. He put them back, striving to instill some form of order. He read. He coded entries on a prefab spreadsheet.

  It was scut, but it did provide an interesting historical snapshot of the high-crime eighties and nineties, detectives barely able to keep pace with the torrent of drive-bys and street slayings, let alone whodunits.

  In keeping with Jacob’s experience at Robbery-Homicide, many instances everyone knew who’d done it. The family knew. The cops knew. The bad guy’s name was in the murder book, circled and underlined. He’d threatened the victim in the past. He had a violent record. He had no alibi. But the evidence wasn’t there to convict. Witnesses refused to come forth. They feared reprisal. They mistrusted the police.

  And so the dead ends accumulated, the Coroner’s map in the crypt unable to accommodate any more pins in its southern and eastern quadrants; squad room whiteboards filling inexorably with the names of young black and Hispanic males.

  One by one, Jacob revisited them.

  Omar Serrano, twenty-five, Boyle Heights, shot to death while stopped at a red light.

  Bobby Garces Casteneda, nineteen, Highland Park, shot to death beneath the Arroyo Seco Parkway.

  Christopher Taylor, twenty-two, Inglewood, shot to death leaving the In-N-Out Burger on Century Boule
vard.

  They weren’t all male.

  Lucy Valdez, fourteen, Echo Park, shot to death, a stray round passing through her kitchen window as she did her geometry homework.

  They paraded past, the unsolved and the unsolvable, chanting the name of August Vollmer, Patron Saint of Wasted Effort; clamoring after Jacob Lev, his rightful heir.

  Every so often, the desk phone would rattle, a detective ferreting out old links. Once, by sheer luck, Jacob had already cataloged the case, and he was able to hand-deliver the material to an astonished and grateful D. The rest of the time he heard himself trotting out excuses. Dates on boxes didn’t match contents. Gappy murder books. Thirty years’ worth of material; a jumble of nightmares.

  The scorn came rolling over the line.

  “What sort of bullshit racket you running?”

  And while Jacob could point to the number of untouched shelves and tell himself he had miles to go before he slept, he knew they were right. He was drawing a DIII’s salary, doing a clerk’s job.

  He’d been kicked way, way upstairs, up into the attic of the past.

  • • •

  NOW, PADDING ALONG in old sneakers, he played the flashlight between boxes marked PROPERTY CRIMES 77 ST 3/11/1990–3/17/1990, VICE HOLLENBECK 07/2006, 1994–5 C.R.A.S.H. The insect’s buzzing had ceased, and he paused in the middle of the aisle, watching his breath billow and dissolve, trying not to touch his lip, which itched like crazy in the cold, dry air.

  He gave in and scratched.

  From his left came a whisper of legs.

  Six feet down the aisle, clinging to a half-opened box labeled HOMICIDE RAMPARTS APR 95: a beetle, its wings creasing and spreading exhaustedly.

  Jacob edged sideways, cup poised.

  Studded antennae bent—a premonition—

  It skittered inside the box.

  He hurriedly folded the flap shut and carried the entire box back to his desk, setting it beneath the spotlight of the gooseneck lamp.

  Readying the cup, he opened the box and brought the trap down over the stunned bug.

  Gotcha.

  The beetle went berserk, throwing itself against the plastic pathetically.

  “Shhh,” he said. He slid an index card into place and moved the cup to the desk. “Take it easy.”

  While the prisoner continued to thrash, he paged through his field guide to insects of the West, eventually finding a match in L. magister, the desert blister beetle.