Джим Батчер - Weird Detectives - Recent Investigations

Her eyes were hooded. “And?”

“And Râzîêl, Rachel . . . the names are very close, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” She sipped wine. “Quite a coincidence.”

“Know something else?”

“What?”

“You told the truth. You didn’t kill that baby.” I paused. “But you let evil destroy itself.”

“And why would I do that?”

I slid out the photograph of the baby’s chest. “The tattoo. We got it wrong, because of the numbers. And the location threw us: over the left breast, not the left forearm. The Germans didn’t start putting tattoos on forearms until after 1942. So, that L —well, it’s not an L. It’s a triangle. And that letter we thought was a cursive M. It’s two ones. And the Z is a seven. See, we don’t put a horizontal line through our sevens and we don’t have that long tail on our ones, but Europeans do. Germans do, except the German lady—and it was the ladies who did them—the one who did this tattoo was sloppy. Not all Germans cared, because these were Jews, after all. But this is a number, Miss Gold: a triangle, then 1-1-7-2-9. Auschwitz Prisoner 1-1-7-2-9.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me about gilguls, Miss Gold.”

Her face was unreadable. “What would you like to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me about reincarnation.”

“Why don’t you tell me, Detective? You’re the one with the story.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Here’s how I think it goes: the Kabbalists believed in reincarnation because they thought all souls came from one great big soul. An Oversoul, I guess you’d call it. Reincarnation isn’t supposed to happen until a person dies. But the Kabbalists said there was ibur, meaning pregnant. That is, a person who already had a soul could house another: two for the price of one. But that was very rare and only happened when the person was very, very good.”

“A tzaddik. A righteous person.”

“But I also found a very obscure reference to an old ritual where a Kabbalist could conjure a soul to share, or take over another body. Here’s the kicker: it’s got to be a kid. Boys are best. The infant is to be left alone, outside, near water and within a week after birth, or if it’s a boy, before his circumcision.” I looked into her eyes. “I’ll bet some of those Holocaust survivors would do just about anything to bring their families back. Even witchcraft.”

“Yes, they would,” she said, her voice calm. “But it’s not their place. Only God can decide.”

I nodded. “So, tell me, Rachel . . . your name is Rachel?”

Her lips curled slightly. “It’ll do.”

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me who Prisoner 11792 was, would you? The records from 1941 aren’t too good.”

“I can’t do that. That’s for God now.”

“I figured. But when they conjured the gilgul of their lost relative, it was your job to stop them. That’s why you summoned Lilith to take the child.”

She inclined her head. The key glittered in candlelight. “The child was an abomination.”

“From where I’m sitting, it’s murder even if you didn’t do it. You could have saved that child. You could have taken it to a hospital.” And yet, I had an involuntary thought: how many times had God killed in the name of justice? The great paradox of the Bible: a book that preaches against killing venerates one of the greatest mass murderers in history.

As if reading my mind—and maybe she could—Gold said, “There are choices, Detective. God can’t rescue you every time you make the wrong one. There are consequences, and sometimes the consequences are unpleasant. Sometimes the consequences include death.”

We were silent a moment. Then she asked, “How did you know?”

“Honestly? A leap of faith. Your employment record, for example. You’ve shown up in a lot of different places, but there’s one thing those places all have in common. They have huge Orthodox populations, mostly German and Eastern European. I’ll bet if I looked, there’d be a string of dead kids before you moved on. And there was that pendant, of course. But the clincher?” I took a sip of my bourbon, savoring the burn. “Your shoes. Like I said—no burrs. But they weren’t muddy either, or wet. And then it hit me.”

“What?”

“You didn’t have to walk, and do you know why?” I grinned then, not quite believing I was going to say it until I did. “Because you flew.”

When a body isn’t claimed, the city buries it. Or volunteers: churches, synagogues, charities. So I wasn’t surprised when Jews buried that baby the night before Halloween.

It’s a year later now. October, again. Halloween. A lot of fall color left. The sky is gunmetal gray and the weatherman said rain, so it’ll probably snow.

The cemetery’s quiet. King David, it’s called. There are stones, flowers. I don’t know why I’m here. I stare down at a child’s grave. The stone is new: ben Judah, son of Israel. A date. A tiny Jewish star.

I think about Rachel Gold. And I come back to the two questions I faced now that I faced then: how the hell do you prosecute an angel? How do you know you should even arrest her?

When we walked out of the darkness of that bar a year ago and into the late afternoon sun, Rachel had said, “What will you write in your report?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. No one would believe it anyway, and I haven’t got a shred of real evidence.”

The sun glinted off her key. “But you believe.”

“Yes.” I stared down at her a few moments. “You’re leaving.” Not a question.

“Yes. It’s a big world, Detective Saunders. A lot of monsters to hunt.”

I nodded. “Mind if I ask you a question? Why did you stay? You had to know about Adam and Rabbi Dietterich. And the way you’ve left your tracks out there for anyone to see . . . you had to know that, eventually, I’d figure this out.”

For the rest of my life, I will remember how she looked at me then: with great compassion and something very close to love.

“Detective, how do you know that you are not the one for whom I remained?” Then, before I could speak, she stepped forward and spread the fingers of her right hand over my heart, and a surge of emotion flooded my chest so that I had to fight for breath. It was like something had come alive in there and was being pushed, no, forced out—and I knew that when I was alone, I would cry in a way that I hadn’t since I was a small child.

“Wounds of the heart are the most difficult to heal,” she said gently. “There are many monsters, Detective. But there are the angels. We are here. All you need to do is know how to look.”

And then I’d watched her move west, into the light of the setting sun. The light was so brilliant my eyes watered and I had to blink. When I’d opened them again, she was gone.

Since then, well, it’s been a long year. One thing, though: I don’t think about Adam as much, and when I do, I’m not as angry. I’m just sad, and even that’s getting less over time, as if the past is bleaching out of my mind like an old photograph, the kind where people fade into ghosts and then penumbras—and then they’re just gone, with only the suggestion of an outline to show that they’d been there at all. So that’s probably good.

I hear the crunch of gravel. Then, a voice I recognize: “Detective Saunders.”

“Rabbi.” We shake hands. “What brings you here?”

Dietterich’s in his standard uniform: long black coat, the hat. A quizzical look creases his features. “I don’t really know. I visit cemeteries, though. I pay respect. There are so many,” he gestures toward the markers, the flowers, “and never enough time to remember them all. And you?”