Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

Her reply was brief.

That’s him.

Jacob leaned on the keyboard tray, feeling short of breath.

If he’d contacted her sooner, maybe she’d have replied sooner.

Maybe he wouldn’t have gone inside the house.

Maybe Schott would be alive.

Jacob considered deleting the e-mail.

He kept it as a reminder to himself. Of what, he wasn’t sure.

Bored shitless, his head annoyingly clear, he found himself thinking about Arkady Tremsin, who had mistaken him for someone else. He spent a long afternoon combing through open-access academic databases, reviewing all of Tremsin’s coauthors.

He found his answer in the February 1995 issue of Chemical Research.

One quick search revealed F. L. Lev to be François Louis Lev, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Lyon, at present teaching at the University of Calgary. The guy had an active Web page with a link to an e-mail address. Jacob thought about writing to him but decided there was no point.

Early on a Friday morning, Dédé Vallot came by with Jacob’s suitcase, retrieved from the hostel, as well as his badge, his wallet, and the Marquessa Duvall file, released from evidence.

The two of them got into Vallot’s white Citroën.

Within the confines of the car, he reverted to the guy Jacob had met in the bar — expansive, animated by a mixture of camaraderie, wonderment, and contempt for authority.

The investigation had started out promising. The fob had been printed and linked to Molchanov. Lacking proof of death, the higher-ups elected to consider him missing. He was wanted for questioning in the deaths of Lidiya and Valko Georgieva. Paul Schott was also listed as missing. The juge looking into Pelletier had requested a review of her records: phone, financial, and so forth.

That ended before it began. Vallot had it on authority from his buddy in intelligence that the General Directorate for Internal Security had intervened. The case was now classified. Vallot had been reassigned to the stabbing of a drug dealer.

He apologized for putting Jacob through the wringer. His exact words were: “I’m sorry for being this asshole.”

“If you’d like to make it up to me,” Jacob said, “I have a suggestion.”

At the airport, Vallot pulled into the parking structure, cut the engine, and handed Jacob his phone.

Jacob typed in Prague November 1982. “Toward the back of Tremsin’s library, in a locked case. The titles are in Cyrillic. There are a bunch of them. I only need the one.”

Vallot put the phone away without looking at it. “I think it’s too difficult.”

“Consider it, okay? That’s all I ask.”

Vallot nodded and popped the trunk.

In it were Schott’s suitcase and a plastic bag containing Schott’s clothes and cowboy boots, recovered from the mansion.

“I’m sorry for your friend,” Vallot said.

“Yours, too,” Jacob said.

A cop on one end to see him off, a cop on the other to greet him.

Mel Subach waited behind LAX customs, leaning against a carpeted structural piling. He was noticeably thinner, but not in a healthy way, his nose filigreed with thin red lines, his blondish hair a crown of cowlicks.

He shook Jacob’s hand but avoided his eye. No banter as they got in the Crown Vic and headed for the 405.

Before signing the discharge order, the doctor had again cautioned Jacob against flying, and now Jacob felt a burning pain in his ear and heard an ominous fizzle, like a swarm of insects just over the horizon. He breathed through the discomfort and stared out at his city, its palette of beige and gray and chaparral brown, so different from Paris. The sour quality of the light. The corroded taste of the air.

It felt honest.

“Must be nice to be home,” Subach said finally.

Jacob sensed the rebuke. He was home; Schott wasn’t. As it was, he was wracked with guilt. He didn’t need more. But he glanced at Subach in the rearview and read the devastation written there; he remembered the shivah for his mother, the consolations that served primarily to bang the gong of absence.

What you wanted was a quick fix. A patch on your heart, strong enough to get you to the next station.

Quietly, he began to recount Schott’s last days, including the mundane and the unpleasant, the strange and the heroic. He talked about Schott getting sick over the smell of lamb kebab; he repeated, to the best of his ability, Schott’s mini-sermon from that night.

Mel said, “I must have fifteen copies of that dumb book lying around. He kept buying it for me, like if he just did that enough, he could get me to read it.”

Jacob told him what else Schott had said: that Mel had saved his life.

Subach kept driving, watching the road, the hollow of his cheek glistening.

Jacob told him about getting slapped silly by Schott in the hostel lobby.

Mel burst into phlegmy laughter. “Yeah, he did have a temper on him.”

Jacob said that Schott had promised to show him his acting reel.

“That? It’s god-awful,” Subach said. “That’s why he was driving a limo. He told you he didn’t like Hollywood, right? Bullshit. He was just a lousy actor.”

Jacob told him about getting locked in a room at the Russian embassy. About the look on Schott’s face when Molchanov separated them.

He told him about the video and said, “He fought like hell.”

Subach dragged his sleeve across his nose. “Thanks for that.”

Jacob nodded.

“So,” Subach said. “What’s your first order of business?”

“Call my victims’ family.”

“And then?”

“Haven’t thought that far. See an ENT, probably.”

“The Commander’s asked me to advise you that your work at the archive is temporarily suspended.”

“Fine by me,” Jacob said. “Where do I report?”

“He hasn’t decided yet.” Subach paused. “He said don’t expect a bonus.”

As they pulled up to the apartment, Jacob leaned forward and handed over the bag containing Schott’s boots and clothes.

Subach stared inside it for a few moments. “Don’t think these’ll fit me anymore.”

“The boots might,” Jacob said.

Mel nodded uncertainly.

“Anyhow,” Jacob said, “don’t be too hasty. You’ll probably gain the weight right back.”

Subach laughed. “Get bent.”

Jacob smiled and climbed out of the car.

He phoned Dolly Duvall.

She said, “You’re sure it was this man.”

“A hundred percent sure, ma’am.”

“And he’s dead.”

“He is.”

Silence filled the line.

“I feel something,” she said. “I just can’t say what it is yet.”

She exhaled. “Well. You told me you’d do your best, and I believe you have.”

“It’s good of you to say so, ma’am.”

“Now I need your address.”

Jacob said, “Ma’am?”

“Do you want a cake or not?”

He had messages on his answering machine, one from his father, one from Divya, and two in the last twenty-four hours from Detective Jan Chrpa in Prague.

Please call, it’s important.

Jacob, it’s again Jan. I called your mobile. Where are you, please?

It was after midnight in Prague. Jacob dialed anyway.

“Ahoj.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you up,” Jacob said.

“No, it’s okay, it’s quiet.”

The feuding kids seemed to have gone to bed. Jacob could hear Jan shifting the phone, opening a squeaky drawer. “I did not want to e-mail. I thought maybe they check.”

They probably would. But it no longer mattered; it wasn’t Special Projects that posed the greatest danger to his mother.