Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

“It’s inconclusive,” Jacob said. “They’re operating under the assumption that his body was moved somewhere.”

Mallick stared at him.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“For what part, precisely?”

“For what happened to Paul, sir. Truly sorry.”

If Jacob had ever expected a show of emotion, it was then. But Mallick just gave a curt nod. “Well,” he said. “This is a lot to unfuck. Even for us.”

Jacob said nothing.

Mallick said, “How close did you get to her?”

“Not close.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”

“The truth would be my preference.”

Jacob said, “Does Moscow have its own branch of Special Projects?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Molchanov was trying to get to Mai. Same as you.”

“Not the same,” Mallick said. “Not at all.”

“Then who was he?”

Mallick shook his head. “He isn’t the main problem.”

“Not to argue, sir, but he was a hell of a problem for me.”

“You’re missing the big picture,” Mallick said. “He’s one individual. What matters to me, Detective — and it should matter to you, too — is that there are others like him out there, waiting for their chance. Looking for her. Hunting her.”

Pale fingers clutched the bedrail. “Do you understand now, why it’s so urgent that we get her under control? If we don’t, someone else will. Believe me when I say you don’t want that.”

Jacob said, “How many others?”

The Commander’s brief look of bewilderment turned to dismay. “I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t even want to think about it. However many there were before, you can bet there’s going to be a lot more now, given how this went down. There’s no possible way I can stop the flow of information. With Pernath, we had corpses. But this... How many people were in that house? Fifty? A hundred?”

“They didn’t see anything,” Jacob said.

“At least a few of them did,” Mallick said. “They saw what happened to Paul. Forget them. A video ? I don’t want to begin to think about it.”

His long legs shifted restlessly. “I’m not designed to operate in today’s world. None of us are. Media. YouTube... We’re forever scrambling to play catch-up.”

Jacob said, “Adapt or die.”

A hollow laugh. “The Internet is full of noise,” Mallick said. “Nobody believes anything anymore. That’s what I tell myself. But who can say?”

He looked at Jacob. “Now you know what keeps me up at night.”

“If it does get out,” Jacob said, “they’ll be hunting for me, too.”

Mallick said, “I think that’s a fair assumption.”

Silence.

“This is why we need to trust each other,” Mallick said.

The policeman’s promise: help me help you .

“I appreciate the offer, sir.”

“That doesn’t sound like yes.”

“I need to think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?”

“It’s a limited sample size,” Jacob said. “But when it comes to keeping me safe, sir, your track record sucks balls.”

A beat.

“Well, Lev,” Mallick said. “I appreciate the candor.”

The two of them sat for a while, a mutually respectful stalemate. A nurse came in to take Jacob’s vitals. When she’d gone, Mallick stood up.

“I’ll need the knife back,” he said.

“What knife, sir?”

Mallick smiled faintly. “Have it your way.”

“Can I ask a favor, sir?”

“I don’t need to define ‘chutzpah’ for you, do I, Lev?”

“Call my father. Tell him I’m all right.”

Mallick nodded. “I’m at the Bristol for a couple of days. Room six thirteen if you need me. Otherwise someone will be in touch as soon as feasible.”

“I appreciate it, sir.”

Mallick said, “See you on the other side, Detective.”

Jacob paged the nurse, asking her to check if his tall friend was still on the floor.

She came back reporting that he’d signed out.

Jacob thanked her, and she smiled and left, shutting the door quietly.

He counted to thirty, peeled back the blanket, and hobbled to the bureau.

In the bottom drawer was a plastic hospital bag containing his crusty, bloody socks and soiled shoes — the only clothing salvageable after the ER staff cut his shirt and pants to ribbons.

He pulled the sock out of the left shoe and fished out the two items he had taken from Tremsin’s house, smuggled out in one of those crusty, bloody socks.

Tremsin’s ring. The potter’s knife.

Jacob set the ring on the bureau.

Taking care not to tangle or yank his lines, knelt down, bending the blade of the knife against the linoleum.

The metal was thin but surprisingly tough. He grunted, his blood pressure monitor letting out a concerned bleep.

Jacob waited for it to level off, then resumed bending, bringing the blade to a ninety-degree angle before it snapped free of the handle and shot off like shrapnel, skittering under the bed.

He retrieved it and deposited it in the biohazard bin. The wooden knife handle he placed in the trash. He dropped the ring in the sock, rolled the sock up, stuffed it in the shoe. He rolled the shoes in the bag and put the bag back in the bottom drawer.

His heart rate monitor was alarming again.

He got into bed and groped around for the morphine button. He pushed it and earned an instant frisson of don’t care . Rough edges smoothed and he thought about Divya Das, back in L.A., wondering if he would get to sleep with her again.

He pushed the button again. Now he really didn’t care. He was the happiest, most carefree motherfucker in Paris.

He thought about Mai, frail and reduced, but sheltering, growing strong again.

He thought about his father. He wasn’t ready to forgive, but he wanted to be ready, he wanted to get there, and to encourage himself, he pushed the button a third time.

The machine beeped. It wouldn’t give him any more. He didn’t mind. He didn’t feel let down. The machine cared about him, and how nice to be cared about. He pushed the button anyway, and listened to the machine beep its refusal, and he thought about his mother, and he kept pushing the button, because it felt so satisfying to make a simple request, a simple chemical request. Even if the answer was no, there was reward in the asking. In some sense the asking was the reward, and so he kept pushing the button, long after the curtain had come down on consciousness and his head ran amok with images strung along the line that separated dreams from nightmares, long after the nurse had returned to find out what the racket was about.

Five days later, a deputy U.S. ambassador of reassuringly medium stature showed up to deliver Jacob a fresh passport and inform him that the embassy had succeeded in getting him cleared to leave France.

“Whether you’re healthy enough to travel is another question.”

The doctor didn’t think so. He refused to discharge Jacob, saying he could permanently damage his hearing if he got on a plane too soon.

As it turned out, a physician’s order carried a lot more weight in France than in the United States. Jacob spent the next several days stalking the halls.

He had to get away from the dry croissants, the stale coffee.

He had to escape the morphine machine.

There was a computer on the floor available for patient use. Jacob hacked chronologically backward through his e-mail. It was mostly junk, but there was a message from Divya, wishing him well.

And another from Susan Lomax.

She’d sent it on the afternoon of the visit to Tremsin’s house, at ten thirty-four a.m. California time, in response to the picture of Dmitri Molchanov Jacob had earlier mailed out.