Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Hollywood

Jacob said nothing.

“Aluminum, also,” the resident said. “Unless you’re bathing yourself in antiperspirant.” He paused again, glanced at Sam, back at Jacob. “Is that something you’ve, uh, done?”

“Eating dirt?” Jacob asked. “Or bathing in antiperspirant?”

“Either.”

Jacob said, “No.”

The resident seemed relieved. “I’m sure it’s a lab error. We’ll definitely keep an eye on it, though. Rest up.”

Jacob lay back, absently running his fingers over his scabbed arm. The taste of mud was faint in the back of his throat. He was thinking about Mai, and Divya Das, and his father saying to her Good to see you rather than Good to meet you .

He looked at Sam, inscrutable as always. “Abba? I think I’d like to sleep a little now.”

His father nodded. He reached for the Zohar. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Four days later, his blood had yet to normalize, but as he was reporting no obvious ill effects, neither the resident nor his insurance could justify keeping him in the hospital any longer. They gave him painkillers and a follow-up appointment. A nurse wheeled him to the curb and he hobbled on crutches to the waiting Taurus.

Nigel got out to hold the door for him. “Lookin good.”

“You should see the other guy.”

The plan was to recuperate at Sam’s. They stopped by Jacob’s place to pick up clothes.

The Honda sat in the carport, looking somehow different. As Nigel helped him limp up the steps, Jacob realized what it was: for the first time in months, the car had been washed.

Jacob asked Nigel if he’d done it.

Nigel laughed. “Nope,” he said, fishing out Sam’s copy of the apartment key. “Maybe some girlfriend did you a favor.”

Everything Subach and Schott had brought — the desk, chair, computer, sat phone, camera, printer, router, battery pack — was gone. The TV had been restored to its original position and reconnected. The bookcase had been repatriated to the living room, the potter’s tools neatly arrayed on the shelves.

Also gone were Phil Ludwig’s boxes of evidence, along with the murder book Jacob had put together.

The bathroom smelled piney. The fridge had been purged. He didn’t own a vacuum cleaner but there were outfield stripes in the bedroom carpet. A zip-top bag on his nightstand contained his wallet, keys, and badge.

His old cell phone was plugged in, fully charged and getting five bars.

His backpack sat on the floor by the closet. He looked inside and saw his tefillin bag; a bunch of candy wrappers; his Glock and the magazine. They’d left him the binoculars, affixed with a Post-it, two words written in a whispery scrawl.

You’re welcome.

He had gotten used to the chaos. The reversion to form disoriented him. He packed hurriedly, stuffing items into a duffel. Nigel hoisted it over one shoulder, the backpack over the other, and went down to put them in the car. While he was gone, Jacob limped to the living room, stood at the bookcase, examining the tools. Combs, paddles, a wire cutter, a set of knives.

One of the knives, the longest one, was missing.

Nigel reappeared in the doorway to help him down the stairs. “Ready to go?”

“Hell yes,” Jacob said.

Downstairs, a white work van was parked across the street.

CURTAINS AND BEYOND — DISCOUNT WINDOW TREATMENTS

An unfamiliar man sat in the driver’s seat. He was black, sitting up so tall that the top quarter of his head was out of view. He appeared not to pay them any attention, but as the Taurus eased into the street, Jacob raised a hand to him, and he waved back.

Sam insisted on taking the pullout couch and giving Jacob his bed, and he proceeded to astonish Jacob by handing him the remote control for a brand-new thirty-inch flat-screen television on a stand.

“Since when do you have that?”

“I’m not a Luddite.”

“You hate TV.”

“You want to argue about it or you want to watch it?”

The barbiturates cleared from his system within forty-eight hours, and withdrawal set in.

Sam watched from a chair by the bedside, a pained expression on his face, as Jacob shivered and leaked sweat. “We should go back to the hospital.”

“N — nnnn, not a ch — chance.”

“Jacob. Please.”

“Juh — just got to ri — ride it... out .”

His hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t lay his tefillin straight.

Sam said, “Don’t feel obliged because of me.”

“You want to argue about it,” Jacob stuttered, “or you want to help me?”

His father got up and cradled him from behind, wrapping the leather straps in evenly spaced coils. They were close against each other, Jacob’s nose pressed to Sam’s scratchy neck, and the smell of Irish Spring made him aware of his own, stale stink.

“I’m so sorry,” he mumbled.

Sam shushed him gently and reached for the head tefillin , smiling as he centered them between Jacob’s eyes.

“What,” Jacob said.

“I was remembering the first time I showed you how to do this,” Sam said. He adjusted the box to the left. “How big they looked on you. No more talking, please.”

Flat on his back, Jacob recited an abridged service, getting through as many of the core recitations as he could manage before the prayer book slipped from his hands.

Delicately, Sam lifted Jacob’s head off the pillow and loosened the tefillin . He removed them; removed the arm tefillin. He fetched a cold towel and sponged down Jacob’s forehead, soothing the spot where the leather box had bitten into his skin.

Tremors yielded to low-grade headache and fatigue, the harbingers of a coming downturn in his mood, emotional nausea to go along with the physical kind. Sam appeared to sense the change, too. He responded by seeking to fill the hours with mild distractions, idle chatter and endless streams of riddles and puns.

Jacob doubted he could stave off full-blown depression with word games, but it was hard not to be charmed somewhat by his father’s enthusiasm for providing care rather than accepting it. It had been a long time since he’d seen how Sam actually lived, and the self-sufficiency his father demonstrated was eye-opening.

Shuffling to and from the kitchen, ferrying tuna fish sandwiches and Gatorade and ice packs, going to the bathroom to rewet the compress or wash out the puke bucket.

Knowing the TV set had been bought for him, Jacob tried to show his appreciation by sticking to programming his father might conceivably enjoy: sports and news. They lamented the Lakers’ early exit from the playoffs, watched baseball without comment. Sam studied while Jacob dozed. Jacob’s major accomplishment of the first week was summoning the energy to call Volpe, Band, and Flores to relay the good news. Grandmaison he didn’t bother with. Let him figure it out on his own.

When he felt well enough, he and Sam began going out for long, slow walks, building up to three times daily, their tempo set by the drilling pain in Jacob’s leg. Along the way they would encounter neighborhood folks, many of whom greeted Sam by name. A soft-bodied woman pursuing a pair of rambunctious grandchildren; a young father wrestling with a stroller. It was as if they owed Sam a great debt of gratitude, as if the weight of his existence lessened theirs, and Jacob thought of Abe Teitelbaum’s refrain about his father being a lamed-vavnik .

On a Thursday evening, near the corner of Airdrome and Preuss, a girl on a bicycle called to them as she whipped by.

“Hi, Mr. Lev.”

Sam raised a hand.

“Popular guy,” Jacob said.

“Everybody loves a clown,” Sam said.