Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

She murmured, fading. Leaving him.

The night in the greenhouse came back: mud flooding his throat, entering his veins to heal him. He bent over to put his mouth to hers but she shook her head.

She said, “You.”

So quiet. So weak. He’d never thought of her as weak.

“You,” she said again, her fingers closing around his.

She went limp.

He looked down.

She was holding his hand.

He was holding the knife.

He slashed open the front of his pant leg. He grabbed a fold of thigh and, grunting, drew an incision six inches long.

Blood sheeted out.

Jacob dipped his fingers in his blood and painted the jagged corner of her wound, watching as the flesh moistened and revived and grew pliable.

He pinched the corner of the wound together.

It sealed like soft clay.

He milked the incision, squeezing out more blood, continuing to balm her, to close her up. At some points the gap between the edges of the gash was so wide that he had to tug, gently, to encourage the two sides to meet. Where the middle of her womb would have been, a sharp tab jutted partway up from within her — an unnatural object, one that did not belong inside her. He thought to remove it, but hesitated, squinting.

Saw it clearly.

A twisted shred of paper, bearing the name of God in black ink.

It was this that Molchanov had been searching for.

Jacob tucked it back inside.

Mai gasped. Her eyes fluttered open.

He wasn’t bleeding fast enough to save her, though. He drew several more incisions in his leg, shorter but deeper, kept molding her back together, until at last she was whole again, her face still ashen as she croaked, “Thank you.”

He sank back, aching.

He said, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

Mai started to laugh. It cracked, turned to retching. He slid over and put his arms around her, feeling the ridge of her spine.

“Can you fly?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she mumbled.

“Can you try?”

She said, “I don’t think I can carry both of us.”

“How about just you?”

She looked at him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll take care of myself.”

The wounds on his leg wept, wept.

He said, “You need to get somewhere safe. That means far away from me.”

He knew what she was thinking then, because he was thinking it, too: forever .

“Don’t say it,” he said.

She smiled tiredly. “I wasn’t going to.”

“You were going to say something.”

“Only that I’ll see you again.”

He kissed her on the forehead. Lifted his arms from her.

He turned and crawled through warm bloody water to Pelletier’s body. By the time he’d found her phone, found Dédé Vallot’s number in the directory, Mai had already disappeared.

Jacob stared at the spot where she’d lain.

He shut his eyes and pressed the button to make the call, breathing in the quiet before the phone began to ring. It lasted a blessedly long time.

The French name for intensive care unit was service de réanimation , which Jacob found good for a cheap laugh.

In addition to the lacerations on his legs, he had a grade-three concussion and a perforated right eardrum. His skull was an unholy gob of pain. The doctor declared him ineligible to leave the hospital for at least two weeks, possibly three. Flying was out of the question.

That was fine. He wasn’t going anywhere. Vallot, standing at the bedside, sounded sheepish as he asked Jacob to remain in Paris until they’d sorted everything out.

Jacob understood: a crooked dead cop was still a dead cop, and he was last man standing.

The account he provided Vallot was literally true — if inadequate.

Pelletier had killed Tremsin.

Molchanov had intervened and killed Pelletier.

Though hurt, Jacob had managed to escape in the chaos and phone for help.

He stressed certain details — the needle in Pelletier’s bracelet — and hoped that the forensic mess would sufficiently plug the gaps.

Listening to himself talk, he wasn’t very convinced.

Vallot patted him on the shoulder and said he’d come back later.

“The fob?” Jacob said. “Did you get prints off it?”

Vallot smiled sadly. “I can’t discuss.”

Jacob smiled back and said he understood. Then he asked to borrow Vallot’s phone: Molchanov had thrown Jacob’s in the pool.

“I need to get in touch with my boss.”

Vallot went outside to give him privacy. Jacob kept the conversation short, relaying a heavily abridged version of the story.

Mike Mallick said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

The following day, Vallot returned with a detective named Sibony and a laptop. They’d pulled the mansion’s security system footage and had been going through it for hours. The movements of people within and without squared with Jacob’s account.

There were, however, no cameras inside the spa, making it impossible to verify the final, crucial minutes. One thing in particular they couldn’t puzzle out.

They showed Jacob a time-stamped clip, soundless but in sharp, glorious color.

Molchanov, accompanied by two guards, riding up in the elevator.

A few minutes later, the guards rode back down.

Molchanov hadn’t left via the elevator.

He hadn’t left via the stairs.

The detectives had recovered his greatcoat, sopping wet.

But where was he?

Jacob said, “I don’t know.”

An uncomfortable silence.

Sibony commandeered the laptop and opened up a second clip.

An agitated Paul Schott paced in a cramped room, held at bay by a horde of guards.

“Fuck,” Jacob said.

He now knew what had drawn Molchanov in such a hurry; what had called the lone remaining guard off the floor. It was all hands to contain Schott, who snarled and stomped like an enraged steer, flushed, shaking, heedless of the forest of machine guns waving at him. Nude except for a pair of socks because they had strip-searched him.

Very brave.

Also very stupid.

Schott ran at them.

For a man of his size, he moved incredibly quickly — so fast, in fact, that none of the guards got a shot off. They piled on him instead, bodies merging to become a single frenzied ball of aggression, all fists and feet and errant muzzle flashes. Knowing the ending, Jacob found it hard to watch. At one point, Schott appeared to get the upper hand. He grabbed a weapon and took one of the guards as a human shield. He was yelling, attempting to muscle his way forward. He appeared to be making progress. The other men began to back off.

Jacob wanted to look away.

Dmitri Molchanov launched into the frame, firing without hesitation, emptying a clip through the guard and into Schott.

A bright flare bleached the screen, wrecking the camera’s focus before everything went black.

Vallot paused the video and opened a new window, showing a photo of the room, evidently taken later.

A bluish haze dusted on the walls.

Jacob sagged, sick with pride and loss.

The French detectives waited for his response.

What could he say?

Test the dust? Run it for DNA? Compare it to the stuff upstairs?

He let the silence drag.

Sibony sounded disturbed to admit that they’d been unable to locate his friend.

They weren’t finished searching the house, Vallot added.

Mallick arrived that afternoon. The bags under his eyes were larger than ever. He shut the door, dragged over a chair, fell into it, and said, “Talk.”

Jacob complied, editing out his night over Paris with Mai, reducing her role in the spa to a cameo.

The Commander didn’t react until Jacob described the video of Schott’s final moments. Then his cheek twitched. “They have it on tape?”