The Golem of Paris Read online

  Native to the Mojave and surrounding areas. Typically they traveled in swarms. How a singleton had made its way into the archive, Jacob couldn’t begin to guess.

  Then again, he could ask the same of himself.

  Maybe the little hothead had pissed off the beetle brass.

  Maybe it was the August M. Vollmer of the chitin-wearing set.

  Jacob lowered his chin and tried to make eye contact. “Lost?”

  The beetle had simmered down and was glowering at him, drops of venom welling at its joints. Jet-black abdomen, head and thorax deep orange. Not a particularly sexy creature, the elytra pebbly and overlong, as if it was wearing poorly hemmed pants.

  He was more interested in what it didn’t look like than what it did.

  He was more interested in what it might become.

  It didn’t look like her. And it didn’t change. It was an ordinary bug, one of roughly a hundred hundred jillion. Compared to beetles, the sum total of every human being who had ever lived, from Adam to Einstein, was a rounding error.

  He reached over and snapped off the lamp.

  • • •

  AT FOUR P.M., he saved his work to a flash drive. The weekend lay depressingly open, a problem solved by grabbing a handful of files from the box to take home.

  He shouldered his backpack and sandwiched the cup and index card between his palms, causing the beetle to resume its frenzy.

  “Chill out,” he said. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

  He’d arrived that morning before sunrise, and he stepped from the hangar into a disorienting midwinter twilight that made it seem as if no time had passed.

  He hesitated before setting the beetle free, mildly concerned that it might turn on him in anger. That was what a human would do.

  Surveying the tapestry of black, the glittering pinpricks, he recalled the taste of Mai’s breath in his mouth as she spoke her good-bye.

  Forever.

  Promise; request; command.

  But he could only swallow infinity in human doses, day by day, keeping his lonely vigil, stalking bugs with a plastic cup and an index card because he had no other way to be close to her.

  He pitched the insect into the air. It shot off, all too happy to get away from him.

  He had to smile. Beetles were survivors. They were high-strung. They spooked easily. Like all the most successful creatures—and they were successful—they lived strictly in the present, vengeance being memory’s deadliest side effect.

  Adapt or die.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She floats on the night wind, watching him from afar.

  He is searching the sky. Hunting for her.

  In the kaleidoscope of her eyes, he appears as a thousand illuminated versions of himself, his color the dreary beige of loneliness. She loves each fragment equally, with fervor and futility, drawing comfort from knowing it is her that his heart breaks for.

  Her heart would break for him. If she had one.

  Forever she thinks, and she pretends that he can hear her.

  A thousand versions of him toss as many beetles into the air; seconds later, the captive streaks past her angrily.

  Thank you, friend.

  The blister beetle doesn’t pause but continues on toward the desert, uninterested in her appreciation. It did its job, it went where she wanted it to go, but not out of any special kindness toward her. She’s a charmer, all right.

  Below, a thousand car doors open, a thousand tailpipes chuff. He drives away.

  Some nights she follows him home. From a distance, of course. They can’t be seen together, and she doesn’t want to alarm him. But she worries. She can’t help but worry. He has a nasty habit of drifting out of his lane, especially after a hard day, especially drunk. More than once she’s had to nudge him back into line.

  Other nights she makes a visit to a fig tree. She sits in its branches. She descends, to rest on the shoulder of an old friend.

  Today is Friday. He’ll be headed there himself, as he does every week.

  So that leaves her at liberty, and—as she does every week—she circles down toward the building, entering through a gap in the roof panels, touching down and transforming into her truest self, standing nude at his desk, her skin pebbled with cold as she riffles through the open box, looking for the file she put there. Not wanting to be obvious about it, she placed it fourth from the top.

  That was months ago.

  True, he would have gotten around to reading it eventually.

  Patience has never been her strong suit.

  Tonight, at last, the file is gone.

  Thank you, friend.

  She ought to feel satisfied, but instead she’s restless and reluctant to leave. The air still smells of him. She lingers, touching his chair, the desk, the surfaces where he has left his oils. On the computer screen, a golden shield bounces around a benign blue field: TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE.

  An idea worth aspiring to.

  He’s left the space heater on. Another bad habit. She shuts it off and raises her arms to the false heaven.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jacob sat facing the madwoman.

  Like every other visit. Sitting. Staring. The two of them beneath a twisted fig, its branches fruitless, the adjacent concrete patio stained purple and brown by the decayed autumn crop.

  The madwoman stared at the ground; at the branches; at her own twitchy hands.

  In Jacob’s direction, but never at him.

  Her hair was dry steel veined with glossy black, a foot of waves tied into a staid bun. Tonight they’d dressed her in a navy-blue cable-knit sweater, tan flannel pajama pants, the fuzzy brown house slippers Jacob brought for her last birthday. An abrasive army surplus blanket draped her lap.

  “Are you warm enough, Ima?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. She wasn’t going to answer. He wrapped the blanket over her shoulders like a prayer shawl. She didn’t appear to notice one way or the other, pursing her lips, still full and red but chapped from long hours in the sun. Like Jacob’s, her complexion was olive toned. Supposedly her own mother’s side was originally Sephardic, Spanish-Jewish aristocracy dating back to the expulsion.

  A tradition, a story, a rumor. You couldn’t prove it, you couldn’t disprove it.

  She asked for you.

  She hasn’t spoken in ten years.

  A decade of lies.

  Following Sam’s confession, Jacob began coming to see Bina every afternoon, desperate to claw back lost time, armed with his own bright ideas for drawing her out. Talk therapy. Touch therapy. Flowers, chocolates, trinkets; a blitzkrieg of love. Her only child, he would bring to the surface the maternal instinct seething like a century-old fire at the bottom of a coal mine.

  Bina sat, stared, her unoccupied hands kneading the air.

  Her doctors couldn’t agree on the cause of the fidgeting. She’d been medicated off and on for Parkinson’s. Well-intentioned nurses would give her whatnot to fuss with—a toilet paper tube, a stress ball with a pharmaceutical company logo.

  There we go. Now she won’t be so bored.

  She had been a gifted and prolific ceramicist, once. Jacob asked the staff if they’d ever tried giving her clay.

  They hadn’t thought of that.

  The following visit, he’d arrived with a package of Plasticine, seven rainbow-hued slabs stuck together. He pulled off a hunk of red, rolled it to warm it up, pressed it into her hands, and waited for the healing to begin.

  She froze.

  Ima?

  Inert as the clay itself.

  Maybe she wanted a different color? He tried orange. Same result.

  He worked his way through the spectrum. Nothing. She was a waxwork. It unnerved him worse than the twitching. He took the clay and put it back in its pouch.

  I’ll leave
this in your room in case you want it.

  His visits thinned to every other day, then twice a week, once. The staff didn’t judge him. On the contrary: they seemed to approve. At last he’d gotten with the program, accepting the basic worthlessness of his presence. The very model of a dutiful son.

  She asked for you.

  Another lie. More than two years, and his mother hadn’t uttered a word.

  • • •

  “WHO . . . WANTS . . . meatloaf?”

  Her name was Rosario, and she was Jacob’s favorite nurse.

  “Looks good,” he said.

  Rosario, tying on Bina’s bib, raised a penciled eyebrow. “I can get you some.”

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  She peeled back the foil on a container of apple juice. “You’re always saying how good it looks. I notice you don’t eat it, though. You know what I think? I think you’re a big talker . . . Am I right, honey?”

  Bina pursed her lips.

  “Yeah, exactly.” To Jacob: “Need anything, I’m inside.”

  Alone again with his mother, he took a pair of challah rolls from his backpack and swaddled them in a paper napkin. He uncapped a mini-bottle of grape juice and filled the extra Dixie cup Rosario had supplied.

  He cranked up a smile. “Ready, Ima?”

  He began to sing Shalom Aleichem, the tune that welcomed in the Sabbath.

  Peace unto you, ministering angels, angels of the Most High.

  Peering through the knotty canopy of the fig tree, he pictured a pair of ethereal winged creatures crashing to earth, wondering what wrong turn they had taken to wind up on the rear patio of Pacific Continuing Care, a division of Graffin Health Services Inc.

  Come in peace, angels of peace, angels of the Most High.

  It was precisely because he didn’t observe the Sabbath that he’d chosen Friday afternoon for his weekly visit. His father was observant, which meant Jacob could come by the facility without any chance of running into him.

  While he was here, though, why not? Maybe the ceremony would touch some dormant spot in Bina’s memory. Even if he felt foolish, mumbling the kiddush prayer, answering amen on her behalf, curling her fingers around the cup.

  He watched his mother sip juice. Guided her tremulous hands to the rolls and made the blessing on bread and handed her a fork.

  “You want seconds, speak up,” he said, hating the rancor in his tone.

  For a few minutes, Jacob watched her eat—robotic, each item delivered in methodical forkfuls. As always, he quickly grew bored. As always, he felt guilty for feeling bored. To occupy himself, he reached into his backpack for the files.

  “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Hipolito Zamora, thirty-one, Westlake, stabbed to death outside a nightclub. No witnesses; no suspects.

  “Outside a nightclub and no one sees. Gimme a break.”

  Bina finished one roll.

  Roderick Young Jr., twenty-six, beaten to death in a schoolyard. Three men in dark jackets spotted fleeing the scene.

  “That narrows it down. More juice, Ima?”

  Bina finished her meatloaf.

  Antonio East, twenty, and Jarome Jaramillo, twenty-nine, shot to death during a liquor store robbery. No suspects.

  “Security footage?” Jacob said, paging to the end. “Height? Build? Clothing? Getaway car? Anything? Why should life be easy?”

  Bina started in on her string beans.

  “Okay,” he said, stuffing the East/Jaramillo file in his bag. “Next.”

  Right away he spotted a problem with the fourth folder: it was the wrong color, the date scribbled on the cover off by nine years, 2004 instead of 1995. Hollywood division in a stack of Ramparts files.

  Not the first example of clerical sloppiness he’d unearthed at the August M. Vollmer archive. But no less annoying. He’d be hunting for the correct box for days.

  “Wonderful,” he muttered, opening the folder. “Okay. So. Twenty-three-year-old black female, Marquessa Duvall; her son, five—”

  The air went out of him.

  Five-year-old black male, Thomas White Jr.

  Bina had finished her beans. The fork rested in her hand.

  She was looking at him.

  He shut the file. “Eat your potatoes. I’ll see if I can scare you up some dessert.”

  He found Rosario at the front desk, doing paperwork.

  “Any chance you have a cookie back there somewhere?”

  “Depends,” she said. “Who’s it for?”

  “My mom.”

  “In that case, maybe,” she said. “Cause you know you don’t deserve a cookie.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  She returned from the kitchen with a torn pack of Nutter Butters, two remaining.

  “Seriously?”

  She reached to take them back.

  “Fine, fine, fine.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  In the dayroom, a handful of residents sat in chairs and wheelchairs oriented toward the television. Jeopardy! was on.

  “Luckily for us, Max Brod disregarded this man’s instructions to burn his writings after his death.”

  Jacob said, “Who is Franz Kafka?”

  “Who is Kafka?” a contestant echoed.

  “Shaddap,” an old man said to Jacob.

  “Literary Ks for six, Alex.”

  Jacob stepped out onto the patio and said, “Oh, no.”

  Pages were strewn far and wide across the concrete, in the bushes, in the dirt.

  His mother had a folder open on her lap.

  “For God’s sake, Ima.”

  He crawled around, corralling the sheets before they could blow away. Big file, three hundred pages or more, now completely out of order.

  He got up, brandishing the papers in one hand and cookies in the other, and came forward to retrieve the folder from his mother. Stopping short as he saw what she had in her lap: a gruesome crime-scene photo of a woman and a young boy.

  Twenty-three-year-old Marquessa Duvall; her son, five-year-old Thomas White Jr.

  Bina was staring intensely at the photo. The focus struck Jacob so sharply that he paused, fascinated by the new acuity. Then he came to his senses.

  Gently, he said, “That’s not for you, Ima.”

  He extracted the photo from her grasp, surprised when she did not resist.

  “I’m sorry if that upset you.” He put the file in his backpack, tugged the zipper shut. “I hope you’re okay with these cookies—oh come on.”

  Bina had jammed her fingers into her mashed potatoes.

  “Ima. You’re gonna make a—Ima. Give it here.”

  But she wrested the tray from him and resumed working the gluey mass, rounding it into a bell; raising, pressing, plucking, roughing out, her fingers flying, a vein in the center of her forehead throbbing manically.

  Dumbstruck, Jacob watched the developing form. It seemed outrageous that it hadn’t collapsed under its own weight.

  Bina snatched up her fork and began carving out fine detail.

  Then, all at once, she stopped. She lifted her hands and, sure enough, the shape imploded.

  But the brief moment before it did was enough to demonstrate her gift. Enough to break Jacob’s heart; enough for him to recognize the reedlike legs, the splayed toes.

  The downy upraised throat of a little bird.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  AUGUST 21, 1968

  Barbara Reich says, “I’m going out.”

  Her mother frowns, dragging a wooden spoon through the simmering pot of hovězí guláš. The stew breathes savory and sour, oily and oppressive, turning the cramped kitchen to a swamp. “Where?”

  “I’m studying with Cindy. We have a test.”<
br />
  “You must eat.”

  “I’ll grab something at her place.”

  If Věra’s frown deepens, it’s to hide her approval. Barbara has left her knapsack carelessly undone, textbooks poking out—doorstops with titles like Practical Biology: A Cellular Approach and Fundamental Principles of Organic Chemistry.

  “Budes okradená,” Věra says, closing the flap and buckling it. You’ll get mugged.

  “Anyone who wants to steal these deserves what they get,” Barbara says.

  Her mother clucks. “Very expensive.”

  “I’m kidding, Maminka.”

  “It is not funny.”

  Right Barbara thinks. Nothing is.

  In the living room, her father is arguing with the New York Times.

  “Bye, Taťka.”

  Jozef Reich slams the paper shut. Like most of his gestures, it lacks the intended punch: no satisfying bang, just a noncommittal crinkle.

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA INVADED BY RUSSIANS AND FOUR OTHER WARSAW PACT FORCES; THEY OPEN FIRE ON CROWDS IN PRAGUE

  TANKS ENTER CITY

  Deaths Are Reported—Troops Surround Offices of Party

  SOVIET EXPLAINS

  Says Its Troops Moved at the Request of Czechoslovaks

  Jozef’s grin is sick and ironic as he hoists his shot glass of slivovice.

  “Socialismus s lidskou tváří,” he says.

  Socialism with a human face.

  Before he has set the glass down, he’s groping in the direction of the bottle. Barbara hands it to him and bends to kiss the vein in the center of his forehead. He smells like overripe plums and motor oil. Each day, he comes home from the garage slathered in grease, and Věra fills the kitchen sink and shampoos his woolly arms up to the elbow.

  “Study good,” he says.

  “I will.”

  Outside it’s so muggy the mosquitoes are complaining. Exactly the wrong weather for beef stew. Her mother’s cookery is driven primarily by economics. Chuck roast is on special, twenty-nine cents a pound, they will eat guláš.

  Barbara trudges down Avenue D in the direction of Cindy’s house, rolling up her sleeves as she goes, aware of Věra watching from the kitchen window, staring down with that weird mix of suspicion and satisfaction. She can feel the knapsack imprinting itself in sweat on her back, the clasp of her brassiere biting into her spine, her blouse patching at the underarms. A group of boys wearing St. Vincent’s ties and listening to the Yankee game wonder aloud what’s hiding beneath her skirt.