Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

Now the pain is real.

On the bowl of her back, she rocks from side to side, managing to flop onto her belly. Flapping her wings slowly, she ascends cautiously in captive space until she touches a solid surface, the roof of her prison, river mud hardened to ceramic.

Tucking her legs in, she braces herself.

Pushes.

It is like arguing with a cliff. She struggles and struggles and meanwhile the gray has begun to drain, taking her strength with it, time running down.

No.

Abandoning caution, she begins slamming herself upward, again and again and again, at last settling on her side, exhausted, gutted by pain, shell split clean open, bleeding, jaws bent, wings shredded, watching the air as it steadily quiets, her eyes closing a hundred at a time.

Noting with satisfaction, before all goes black, a pale, slim fissure, a crack in the darkness of clay.

LAPD CHIEF AUGUST M. VOLLMER MEMORIAL ARCHIVE

EL MONTE, CALIFORNIA

PRESENT DAY

Detective Jacob Lev tracked the insect as it descended from the darkness between the rafters. The closer it came, the faster it circled, the buzz of its wings rising above the ambient rumble until it ducked down a row of steel shelves, out of sight.

Absently he scratched at the scar on his upper lip, then groped in his backpack for a flashlight, a clear plastic cup, and a fuzz-edged index card.

The Vollmer archive occupied one corner of a World War II — era hangar due east of Los Angeles, a vast sad wart on the back of crumbling El Monte Airport. For years the owner had been petitioning the county to rezone it for condos, a request never to be granted, because the place fit the bill exactly for local government agencies seeking to cheaply store their crap.

Regional Planning, Public Health, law enforcement from Long Beach to Simi Valley: the layout screamed territoriality, cubic miles of yellowing paper providing refuge for squirrels, rodents, snakes, not to mention an impressively varied insect menagerie. Jacob had personally evicted three generations of raccoons.

The vaulted, ribbed aluminum roof thwarted cell reception and created a microclimate prone to extremes, amplifying the summer heat and dripping in winter. Mushrooms fruited through the concrete. Bulbous metal halide lamps took half an hour to come to full strength, creating an unforgiving haze that reduced him to a specimen on a slide. He usually left them off and worked by the light of his computer screen.

Restocking was on the honor system. You needed a keycard for access, but otherwise nothing prevented you from carting off crates of supposedly sensitive material.

There was nobody to shoot the shit with. Nobody to make a coffee run. No roach coach outside trumpeting “La Cucaracha.” In eleven months, Jacob had encountered nine other human beings — data hounds, lost souls.

His ideal work environment.

It hadn’t always been this way.

More than two years had passed since the events that derailed him — events that he still did not understand, because understanding them meant agreeing to take them at face value, which he refused to do, because they were manifestly batshit.

More than two years since he woke up and found a naked woman in his apartment. She called herself Mai. She smiled at him and told him she had come down looking for a good time. Then she vanished into the morning.

More than two years since his first visit from Special Projects, an LAPD division he’d never heard of.

No one had heard of it. Officially, it didn’t exist.

But it was real, or real enough, made up of strange, towering men and women who obeyed a code of their own; spoke their own, private truth; used Jacob for their own purposes. Real enough to reassign him. The division commander was a guy named Mike Mallick, an emaciated pedant who sent Jacob to Prague and England and back in search of a serial killer named Richard Pernath.

Jacob had caught him. Tracked down his accomplices, too. He’d done as well as you could ask of any cop, learning a lot of surprising things along the way.

He learned that his father, Sam, was descended from a sixteenth-century Jewish mystic.

He learned that his mother, Bina, wasn’t dead, as Sam had led him to believe, but alive — if not well — in an Alhambra nursing home.

He learned that well enough for any cop was not good enough for Special Projects.

What they wanted, more than any criminal of flesh and blood, was Mai.

And Jacob learned that the naked woman from his apartment was no ordinary woman, but a creature of no fixed shape, capricious and alluring and terrifying, capable of breathtaking violence and breathtaking tenderness in the same gesture. No ordinary woman: she was drawn to him, over centuries, like a star spiraling toward a black hole.

Making him, in the view of Special Projects, bait.

It had come down to a bloody night in a greenhouse, Jacob gripping her by the hands amid a glittering lake of glass while the tall men drew near for the kill. Stay right where you are they warned Jacob.

He didn’t.

He released her, and she looked at him and said Forever and flew away, sending Mallick and company into an unearthly fit of rage.

You have done a great wrong.

In the aftermath, Special Projects seemed divided on how to deal with him. Their initial response was swift and brutal, a short punt to a desk job in Valley Traffic.

But they still needed him, for the next time Mai turned up. They seemed convinced that she would, putting round-the-clock surveillance on his apartment.

And outwardly, they made a show of appreciation. Jacob had nearly died at Pernath’s hands, and six months after his release from the hospital, he got a visit from Mallick’s mammoth, dyspeptic deputy, Paul Schott, come to deliver a citation for outstanding work, along with a check for ten grand.

A “performance bonus.”

LAPD didn’t give bonuses.

It was hush money.

Jacob tore it up.

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.”