The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter twenty-four

On the TV above the sushi bar, the Los Angeles Lakers were employing their go-to strategy of blowing a double-digit lead late in the fourth quarter. Lawyers in open-necked shirts thumped their tables and shook their Rolexes at the screen.

Jacob had intended to celebrate his discovery by treating himself to a halfway decent dinner, consumed alone and in peace. That intention lasted as long as his miso soup, at which point the implications of his discovery began to sift down through his consciousness.

That he was, apparently, the first person to notice the east-west pattern was no knock on the previous Ds, regardless of what Ludwig said. Mystery novels were fun, sometimes even for cops, but real-life whodunits provoked dread and anxiety. In most homicides, you assembled facts, filtered out noise, pursued leads that were usually obvious because criminals were for the most part stupid. Case closed.

On whodunits, blind spots and biases were inevitable.

It was, in fact, just such a bias that had enabled Jacob to recognize the pattern. And even now, he couldn’t help seeing everything through a Jewish lens.

Member-of-the-tribe Creepers?

His silent God forbid made him smile with self-derision.

You could forbid if I believed in You.

One Jewish Creeper taken out by another didn’t make him feel any better.

The most palatable possibility was a new actor somehow rooting out the Creepers and engaging in felony cleansing. Better, but still repellent, because Jacob’s gut response to freelance revenge was the old collective-guilt atavism born of pogroms and inquisitions and blood libels.

You did what? Oy vey, what will the gentiles think of us?

An uncomfortable relic of Judaism’s tribal roots popped into his head: the goel hadam, the “redeemer of blood,” partially entitled by biblical law to hunt down and slay anyone who’d ended the life of a kinsman. Partial, because of a strange restriction: the goel hadam retained his right of vigilantism only in cases of manslaughter or accidental death. Willful murderers were to be tried and executed by a court of twenty-three judges.

He raised his finger for another carafe of warm sake.

A Harvard sophomore who considered himself an expert on Japan had once informed Jacob that heating sake was a trick to mask the imperfections of a low-quality brew. Cold and expensive was the way to go. Jacob liked imperfections. Like the failing exterior of Sherri Levesque’s house, crappy liquor was honest, reminding him he wasn’t drinking for the taste.

He poured, swirled the lacquered box. In any other context he found sake cloying, but you couldn’t beat it for chasing tekka maki. The fact that every culture had its own form of alcohol, tailored to pair with its cuisine, pointed to an obvious truth: eating was merely an excuse to get blitzed.

Banzai!

Groans rose as the Enforcer Formerly Known as Ron Artest clanged a three-pointer.

The day’s breakthrough had earned him the right to dinner, at least. He handed the waitress his white Discover credit card. A minute later she came back shaking her head.

“Declined,” she said.

Big surprise. Jacob tossed down four twenties and left.

The scene at 187 was the usual lukewarm mess, walls of sweaty bodies, what was probably music but sounded like a rhino stampede.

“Yo,” Victor said, pouring him a bourbon. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Do I owe you money?”

“Your friend’s here.”

Jacob looked around for his bug-bit mattress pal. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d encountered a one-night partner here. If he was lucky, this one might not remember him.

It felt like you were stabbing me.

Don’t count on it.

He didn’t see her, mimed the universal sign for big breasts to Victor.

“Nuh-uh, bro, the chick you was asking about. The supermodel.”

Jacob’s chest tightened. “Where?”

“She came in like literally two minutes before you.” Victor squinted. “I don’t know where she went. Bathroom?”

Jacob left his bourbon untouched and shouldered his way through the crowd, overturning drinks and jostling pool cues and disrupting make-out sessions.

Watch it, asshole.

The line for the ladies’ was four strong. Jacob cut to the front and, figuring he’d already seen everything she could conceivably care to hide, barged in.

A woman he didn’t know squatted over the toilet with her jeans around her ankles. She was so busy texting that at first she didn’t notice him. Then she looked up and shrieked, dropping her phone in the bowl.

“Sorry,” Jacob said.

He left her scrambling for modesty and plunged back into the melee. He didn’t find her there, either, and he headed for the exit.

Halfway across the dance floor, a meaty hand clamped around his biceps. He said, “Fuck off, pal,” but the hand dragged him back and he felt a rush of frustration and a surge of adrenaline, his limbic system telegraphing bar fight as a meaty arm put him in a meaty embrace that morphed into a decidedly nonmeaty noogie.

“Lev, you skinny-ass son of a bitch.”

Mel Subach grinned. “Didn’t know you came here, Jake.”

Jacob tried to free himself. It was like gator wrestling. Subach, still smiling, let go. “Let’s have a drink. I’m buying.”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, live a little.”

Jacob pushed past him, toward the door.

“I thought we were friends,” Subach yelled.

Outside in the alley, a shape hurried away into the night.

A woman — that much he could tell — but he couldn’t fix her; she was fifty feet gone and walking fast, and as he began jogging after her, she seemed to come in and out of being, like a faint star, detectable at the periphery of his vision, winking out when he turned his gaze directly on her.

Behind him, music blared; the door opening. “Jake. Where you going, man?”

“Mai!” Jacob yelled.

She glanced back.

Saw him.

Started to run.

“Wait!” Jacob yelled, feet slipping drunkenly on gravel. The tread caught and he sprinted, Subach’s lumbering steps close on his heels. The big guy could move.

So could Mai. The distance between them rapidly stretched.

“Mai. It’s me, Ja...” — he was huffing — “Jacob. The — wait.”

“Wait!” Subach yelled.

The alley was roughly the length of a football field. Jacob put on the jets, and he seemed to be gaining on her, and for a moment he thought he might get to her, but they reached the mouth of the alley and Mai streaked into the street toward a vacant lot surrounded by chain-link and filled with dark weeds and he stumbled after without pausing for traffic and from his left came an onrushing air pressure and the heat of headlights and a gnashing aluminum grille and his collar tightened and he flew backward like a hooked vaudevillian so that the side of a van passed inches in front of him, close enough for him to count paint scratches.

He landed hard, on his tailbone, on the concrete.

The van fishtailed, coming to a halt thirty feet up the road.

Panting, Jacob rose to his elbows.

Mai had vanished.

Subach knelt by his side. “You okay?”

Jacob stared.

In front of him: the vacant lot.

To the right: a plumbing supplier.

To the left: an unmarked warehouse.

“Where’d she go?” Jacob said.

He tried to stand but Subach restrained him gently. “Buddy. You got to relax.”

The van gunned its engine and roared off, due south down La Cienega. Through the noxious orange of sodium vapor lamps, the weathered lettering was barely legible.