The Golem of Hollywood
Page 9
The address Divya Das had given him turned out to be a pink stucco apartment complex fronting an unsavory stretch of Venice Boulevard. A homeless man slept on the grass beneath a hopeless sign touting one-, two-, and three-bedroom vacancies.
Jacob parked on a side street, cut the engine, and played the voicemail from his father.
Hi, Jacob. I don’t know if you listened to my previous message, but please disregard it. I’ll manage.
He hadn’t listened to it. Now he had to.
Hi, Jacob. You’ve probably got your hands full, since I haven’t heard from you. Not to worry. I have everything prepared, except for one thing: Nigel accidentally brought me two challahs instead of three and I wanted to ask, if it’s not too great an inconvenience, maybe you might have time to pick up another. I like poppy seed, but—
Jacob stopped the playback and dialed him.
“Jacob? Did you get my other message?”
“I got it. Can I ask you something, Abba?”
“Of course.”
“Was that an honest attempt to absolve me of picking up the challah, or was it intended to make me feel guilty?”
Sam chuckled. “You think too much.”
Jacob rubbed one gummy eye. “What time’s dinner?”
—
DIVYA DAS HAD APPROACHED her generic white Sheetrock walls as a blank canvas, embarking on a charmingly random spree of color and texture. A neon orange throw revived a battered sofa; the dining table was a fifties-era TV set topped with glass. Laminated prints of gods and goddesses brightened the living room: elephant-headed Ganesha, Hanuman the monkey god.
He meant to tell her about the missing letters, but she began chatting with him, inviting him to sit at the breakfast bar and setting out a plate of cookies and a steaming mug.
“There we are,” she said. “Proper tea.”
He took a mouthful. It was scalding.
“Shit,” he gasped.
“I was about to say,” she said, “you might want to blow on it.”
“. . . thanks.”
“It’s essential to use fresh, clean water and to bring it right up to the boil. Americans consistently neglect that step, with disastrous results.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It tastes much better with a third-degree burn.”
“Do you need me to call an ambulance?”
“Some milk would be nice.”
She got it for him. “I’m sorry I don’t have something more substantial to offer you.”
“Don’t be. This is the most complete breakfast I’ve had in months.”
“I shall have to tell your mother.”
“You’ll have to shout pretty loud,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“Oh, my,” she said. “I’m so sincerely sorry.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Well, I ought not to make assumptions.”
“Don’t sweat it. Really.” To spare her further embarrassment, he pointed to the fridge door, magnets pinning snapshots. “You and yours?”
The centermost photo had Divya embracing an elderly woman in a red sari. “My naniji. This one”—a host of people arrayed on either side of an elaborately bedecked couple—“is from my brother’s wedding.”
“When did you move to the U.S.?”
“Seven years ago,” she said. “For graduate school.”
“Columbia,” he said.
“Have you been checking up on me, Detective?”
“Just Google.”
“Then I’m sure you know everything you need to know.”
There were others photos, too, that she apparently did not think required explanation. They showed her in far-flung locales, engaged in mildly risky activities: strapped into a rock-climbing harness; in ski suit and goggles; among girlfriends woozily hoisting margarita glasses.
No kissy photo booth strip; no thick-haired man in surgeon’s scrubs, clutched around the waist.
She said, “I hope I didn’t bother you, calling on you early.”
“I was up.”
“I wanted to catch you before I had to leave for the day. I know it’s unorthodox to meet here, but it’s for the best. I’ve had to tread lightly. My immediate superior isn’t very gung-ho about your severed head. Right now we’ve got several pathologists away at a convention, and the bodies are piling up.”
“What’s that mean, not very gung-ho?”
“I believe his exact words were, ‘I haven’t got time for curiosities.’”
“It’s a homicide.”
“He tried to convince me it’s a relic from a museum.”
“With fresh vomit?”
“I didn’t say he was successful,” she said. “Or sensible. But I know better than to waste time arguing. He can be rather authoritarian, especially under stress.”
“So you called me here to apologize for not working my case?”
She smiled, causing a gold stud in her left nostril to twinkle. He hadn’t noticed it before.
She said, “I’m afraid I’ve been a bit naughty.”
—
HER APARTMENT WAS a two-bedroom. The door to the first was ajar, giving Jacob a glimpse of a bed piled with embroidered pillows.
The second had been set up as a mini pathology lab. Heavy-duty plastic sheeting protected the carpet. A dissection tray sat on a folding table; a desk hosted a microscope; there were bins labeled for scalpels and forceps and hammers, a biohazard container, an air purifier, and a two-thousand-count box of nitrile exam gloves.
Jacob looked at her.
She shrugged. “Beg, borrow, and steal. Nothing fancy, mostly surplus. I’ve been refining it since my student days. No mean feat getting it through customs, believe you me.”
“It’s nice to meet someone as OCD as me,” he said.
“It helps to pass the time,” she said.
And explains in part why you’re single. Jacob liked her more and more.
In the closet, a wire rack displayed five vinyl bowling bags—the pink and green versions she’d had with her at the crime scene, and three others in orange, black, and red.
“Very Sex and the City,” he said.
She pointed to the green bag. “Emesis.” The black one. “Fingerprints.” Red. “Blood.” Pink. “Gobbety bits.”
“Orange?”
“For when I go dancing,” she said. “It’s my favorite color. Tell me: how would you know anything about Sex and the City?”
“Ex-wife,” he said.
“Ah,” she said.
He wondered if he’d erred, because in the next breath she was back to business. “I didn’t want my boss looking over my shoulder, so I brought the material here—”
“Material?”
“The head. Vomit, too. They’re in the freezer.”
“Remind me never to have ice cream here, either.”
“If I might continue, please. The vomit wasn’t very useful. It was so laced with acid that it actually began corroding my glove. And I confess I still haven’t been able to determine what sealed the neck. The skin isn’t blistered or scorched in keeping with a blast of high heat. I suspect it’s some form of tissue adhesive, such as hospitals use to aid in wound repair.”
“Someone with specialized knowledge,” Jacob said. “Access to medical supplies.”
“Possibly. Although you can order transglutaminase over the Internet. Chefs use it. They call it meat glue.”
“A mad doctor or a mad chef.”
“Or none of the above. That’s not the interesting part, though. I took tissue from the head and snuck into the Coroner’s lab to extract DNA and run it through CODIS. I wasn’t expecting much, but I wanted to be thorough. It’s your lucky day, Detective. You’re familiar with the Night Creeper, I presume.”
Certainly he was.
Jacob, dumbstruck, watched her give a shallow curtsy.
“Ta-da,” she said.
THE LAND OF NOD
On the morning of Asham’s departure, her father again tries to dissuade her.
“You’ll never find them.”
“I won’t if I stay,” Asham says.
Eve mumbles to herself.
“Our place is here,” Adam says, gesturing to the valley walls. “You have no right to leave. Seeking knowledge that isn’t yours is the source of all evil. There’s no worse sin.”
“You think?” Asham says. “I can come up with a few.”
“He’s right,” Yaffa says. “Please.”
Asham looks at her ruined sister. Her golden hair has turned to weeds; blue veins worm across her face. She has refused to cast off her widow’s garb, refused to work, spending her days cross-legged on the dirt floor, picking listlessly at the skin on her hands.
With Cain fled, and Nava gone with him, the burdens have fallen heavily upon Asham, leaving her to draw the water, cut the firewood, gather the food and cook it; leaving her to grit her teeth while Yaffa keens.
Where is my beloved?
Where is his vengeance?
Asham wants to shake her.
Your beloved is gone.
His vengeance is yours for the taking.
But it requires that you stop crying.
It requires that you stand up, and act.
Asham says, “You don’t know what’s out there.”
“That’s the point,” Adam says. “And if you do find them? How many must I lose?”
“It’s justice.”
“Justice is the Lord’s to dispense, not yours.”
“Tell that to your dead son,” she says.
He slaps her.
In the silence, Eve’s murmuring is like a shout.
Yaffa says, “You don’t need to go. I don’t want you to hurt him.”
“What hardness is in you,” Adam says, “that you cannot forgive when she can?”
Asham, remembering the scream of an unbodied soul, says, “She wasn’t there.”
—
SHE CARRIES LITTLE. Spare sandals; a blanket of wool and another of flax; a small gourd; a slaughtering stone.
All products of Cain’s ingenuity.
She could not pursue him without his help.
Knowing that they cannot be without a source of fresh water, she follows the river upstream, away from the family’s sheltered nook in the shadow of the Mountain of Consideration. The next morning she arrives at a sharp bend, the farthest boundary of their cultivation. Past that, their father has said, it is forbidden for man to venture—forbidden to think about venturing.
She remembers a day long ago, standing beside Cain, staring at the opposite bank.
How can a thought be forbidden?
He will have exploited superstition.
In his position, she would do the same.
She wades to the other side.
The valley winds, narrows, widens again. Hacked vines scabbed with dried sap point the way, and she seeks blackened patches—the remnants of campfires, each of which represents a day of their progress. Behind her, smoke threads from the top of the Mountain of Consideration, which shrinks and drops below the horizon. Vegetation rushes in unchecked. The land’s cheery face slackens to indifference and then to a hostile frown. Even the wildflowers appear malignant and overbright. Strange animals stare, unblinking, unafraid. Distant shrieks steal her breath. Skeletons, picked clean, hurry her on.
When Asham was a girl, her parents talked about the hideous fate that awaited anyone who strayed too far. Unimaginable cold, rivers of fire that boiled away flesh, leaving bones for wild beasts to gnaw on. Seizing out of a nightmare, she would feel Yaffa beside her, also trembling, and the two of them would cling together, mewling.
It was Cain who consoled them, Cain with his angry logic.
How would they know what’s out there if they’ve never been?
The Lord told them.
Did you hear him?
No, but—
They’re just trying to scare you.
I am scared.
Which one is it? Beasts? Or fire? Or cold?
All three.
Fine, then. We’ll go one by one. First: anything that can melt your flesh or freeze you solid can do the same to a beast. And heat and cold cancel each other out. So at worst it’s one at a time, not all three. And say your bones do get gnawed on. Who cares? You’ll already be frozen. Or burned. Either way, you’ll be dead, and you won’t feel it.
By that point in the argument, Yaffa had her hands clamped over her ears, begging him to stop. Asham was giggling uncontrollably.
And say they are telling the truth he went on. They’re not. But say they are. You’re safe as long as you’re here. Isn’t that what they said? Right. So. You have nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep and stop kicking me.
That he so long acted as her source of reason makes it all the more difficult for her to understand his crime. Not an hour passes in which she doesn’t see his senseless, swollen face.
Now he is the source of her nightmares.
Rage is a fruit that grows larger with every bite. When she is hungry, she eats of it. It is the drummer that never tires. When she wearies, she marches to the pounding of its fists. Each step is consecrated, the long run-up to an altar. She will offer her brother up as an atonement for himself, save him, redeem him. It will be as much an act of mercy as of justice.
—
ON THE TWENTY-SIXTH DAY, she surpasses the tree line and beholds a new mountain, unfathomably huge, its summit lost in the clouds.
She weeps.
Because she is so tired and yet must ascend.
Because something so beautiful could exist without her ever having known.
The river has been growing steadily, so that its width is now doubled. It roars down the mountainside, carving the stone, hurtling off ledges and exploding into mist. She spends much of the initial stage of her climb soaked, her teeth chattering. Between that and the thinning ground cover, building a fire becomes an ordeal.
From what she can see, Cain and Nava had the same problem.
On the thirtieth day, she kneels before the wreckage of the wooden mule, grieving to see such a marvelous creation reduced to charcoal.
He went about it wisely, of course, breaking the wood up and parceling it out bit by bit, stretching its use to four days, leaving nothing for her to burn.
She wraps herself in blankets and struggles on. The valley’s lushness is forgotten here. There are no trees, no soft places to lie, only gravel that causes her to lose her footing, boulders that deflect vicious gusts of wind at unexpected angles, threatening to sweep her off into space.
She could not have imagined how cold it could get.
Perhaps her parents weren’t lying, after all.
The hard ground obscures the trail, and increasingly she finds herself confronting an inscrutable expanse of gray stone. She puts herself in Cain’s place and asks: Where would I go?
And when she looks again the correct path seems to glow before her.
And invariably she comes to a black patch beside a stumpy, denuded shrub, the most logical spot to build a fire in this illogical place.
She can do this because he spoke the truth.
She is more like him than she realized.
—
ON THE THIRTY-THIRD DAY, the ground turns a dazzling white.
Asham bends down to scoop some up; gasps, entranced, as it dissolves.
She has no word to describe its radiance.
She licks her palm.
It’s water.
The river, too, has begun to crust over, and later that day it disappears, and she realizes she has come to its place of origin, which Cain talked about as if its existence were a certainty, and which her father dismissed as an impossibility.
She has not eaten in two days. She gobbles white by the mouthful, cold etching down her throat, and walks on.
No matter how hard she sucks in air, her lungs never seem satisfied. Her head spins and she pants silvery clouds as she climbs through the starlit night, afraid to stop and sleep.
Dawn reveals a vivid splash of red against the gray landscape. She cannot understand what it is until she’s standing right next to it, and even then she must pry open her mind to admit the reality of the horror.
It is the mule—the living one. Its head and tail are missing. Its hide is flayed and chunks of flesh are carved away from the bone.
Unnatural carnage; the work of man.
Starving, she falls upon the carcass with a stone, slices off half-frozen shreds.
Her first taste of animal flesh is a revelation. The texture and flavor make her feel as though she has bitten off and is chewing her own tongue.
It nauseates her and yet she craves it. It fills her belly and reignites her rage.
A jagged flap of hide dangles from the mule’s underbelly. Asham removes it and holds it against herself, warming it to pliability. She hacks it in half and wraps the pieces around her numb feet. Another strip, cut from the neck, she drapes over her own neck and shoulders.
She breaks the mule’s ribs and uses them to skewer scraps of flesh.
The animal toiled without complaint to bring their harvest. It is feeding them still.
She spends half a day burying its useless remains.
On the thirty-sixth day, she reaches the pass.
The summit remains cloaked, but she can see down a sheer corridor of blue-white walls to daylight. She staggers along blessedly level ground. From within the walls come pings and cracks and snaps, muffled, and she hurries toward the light, and the sounds grow louder, and she begins to run, but she cannot outrun them, and the air trembles terribly and the mountain bellows its displeasure.
—
SHE AWAKENS in the dark.
Her last memory is of a rushing wall of white, then an all-encompassing cold.