The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter thirty-three

Dlouhá veered southward to Old Town Square, silent but for the purr of pigeons foraging between the legs of café tables.

Jan laid a hand on a park bench, one of many ringing a sprawling bronze monument.

“The girl was here,” he said. “She was crying, like very upset. She says there is a man, he tried to rape me outside the synagogue. The patrolman calls for the ambulance to take her to hospital, then he goes to look for the man. Follow me, please.”

They walked over damp cobblestones and onto Pařížská, toward Josefov.

Jacob should’ve known better than to trust his father’s guidebook. The former Jewish quarter was no longer run-down, but leafy and posh. Designer clothing draped mannequins posed behind boutique windows. A man in a chef’s jacket emerged from a basement door to tip a bucket of sudsy water into the gutter.

Jan said, “The městská policie cannot investigate murder, they must call us. Usually there are several detectives, crime technics. But when I came, I didn’t find this, only one patrolman. Very soon a technic I don’t know arrived to collect the remains.”

“Was he tall, too?”

Jan had to think. “... yes. I didn’t pay attention to this. I was not investigating him, I was investigating the scene. This is what you experienced?”

“Basically.”

“The technic was making me crazy, because I wanted to look carefully, and he says, ‘Hurry, please, we must go quickly.’ I thought he wants to clean up before the tourists arrived.”

He paused his account to snap a picture of a metallic gold Ferrari with Russian plates.

“Lenka wouldn’t approve,” Jacob said.

“She is too angry. I told her, this time is over.”

“Not for her.”

“This is because she was not there. I told her, you can’t be angry, you need to be practical. It’s the same with the police. These guys who were working for — do you know what is ehs-teh-beh?”

Jacob shook his head.

“Státní Bezpečnost. Czechoslovak secret police. Most of them, they left after the Revolution. Some were very bad guys, okay, it’s true. But some of them, we said, ‘Stay,’ because they have experience, knowledge.”

“You don’t find that uncomfortable? Working with them?”

Jan shrugged. “The policeman, he’s the hand of the law. Before, our laws were bad, so...” He mimed slapping a face. “Now, we have good laws. So it’s okay. Okay, we are here.”

Jacob recognized the shape of the Alt-Neu Shul from the grainy black-and-white guidebook photograph. In real life, it was waist down the color of parchment, its upper half layered in brown, scabby brick, as though the orange roof tiles had bled downhill and clotted. Ten steps led to a cobbled area inset with a central drain, given onto by an embossed metal door.

Trash cans were stacked nearby: this was the service entrance. A cloudy stained-glass rosette cut into the building’s exterior wall revealed its considerable thickness.

A stack of metal rungs rose to a smaller wooden door, three stories up.

Weighty with soot, sunken into the earth, the entire structure seemed nevertheless to hover, its contours uncertain.

Jan paused halfway down the steps. “You are coming?”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. He followed. “Yeah.”

“The head was here.” Jan was crouched near the drain, indicating with his finger.

He pointed two feet to the left. “There, the vomit.”

Standing, he arched his back and coughed. “This was like difficult for me to understand. There is no blood, so it must be they washed it to the drain. But the head and the vomit they left.”

“Same thing with me. I figured the murder took place somewhere else.”

Jan shook his head. “The girl, when she goes, the man is standing here. The patrolman comes, the body is here. The killer takes him away, cuts his head, and brings it back? This is not logical. There is not enough time. Where can he do this? I search the neighborhood. There is no blood. There is no weapon. Nobody hears nothing. Nobody sees nothing.”

Despite himself, Jacob felt his own theories starting to slip. He had come seeking the certainty of common ground. “We’re in the middle of the city. No witnesses?”

“At that time, it is quiet.” Jan pointed across Pařížská, to the luxe apartments set over a brasserie. “These flats, the bedrooms are away from the street. The jewelry store has a camera, but the angle is not right. Here, it’s like invisible.”

Jacob’s gaze traveled up to the small wooden door.

... moving quickly in the dead of night, they ascended to the garret...

Jan said, “It was open.”

“That door?”

“Yes.”

For a moment, Jacob’s field of vision pinched. When the world returned, Jan was staring at him, brows knit. “Jacob? You are okay?”

“Fine.” Jacob swallowed, smiled. “Jet lag.”

He turned to study the undersized door. At that height, it appeared to serve no purpose, as though a child had gotten hold of the blueprint and scribbled it in, builders following the instructions unthinkingly before anyone noticed the absurdity.

“Any idea how it got open?”

“The man in charge of security for the synagogue said a wind.”

“Was it windy that night?”

Jan shook his head: I don’t know.

Distantly, unwillingly, the city stirred: arthritic trams, gaseous hiss of street sweepers.

“Tell me about the girl. What brought her here?”

“She works in the synagogue, cleaning at night. She is standing here, there is a noise behind. She turns and sees a man with a knife. He grabs her, she is fighting, boom, he lets her go, and she runs away.”

“Did she see what happened to him?”

“She was scared, she’s not staying there to wait.”

“She could positively ID the head as the same guy who jumped her, though.”

“I came to hospital to show her a picture. She started to scream again.”

“I assume that she denied having anything to do with killing him.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you believe her.”

“She was not strong enough to do this.”

“She was strong enough to fight him off.”

“Yes, okay, but this is not the same. She had no blood on her clothes.”

“She could have changed.”

“I’m telling you, it is not possible.”

“The reason I ask, it was a woman who called in my case.”

Jan raised his eyebrows.

Jacob got out his phone, and together they listened to the audio file. It disturbed him to realize that he was still hearing the voice as Mai’s. He thought he’d worked through that possibility, and dismissed it.

If Jan noticed anything amiss with the woman’s words, he didn’t mention it.

“This cannot be the same person,” he said. “She was Czech girl.”

Jacob believed him — believed that he believed it, at any rate.

On the sidewalk above, a man with a briefcase hurried past, barking into his headset, paying the detectives no heed.

“Where’d you find the Hebrew?” Jacob asked.

Jan pointed out a blank cobblestone, less foot-worn than those around it. “When I came back from United States, it was replaced.”

“What happened to the original?”

“The case was not mine, so I was not able to ask questions.”

“Do you have a picture of it?”

“On my computer. I can send it to you.”

“Thanks.”

Jan said, “The man in charge of security for the synagogue, I showed him this word. It means, ‘Justice.’ This made me think of the girl’s boyfriend or brother or father. But she has no boyfriend or brother or father. She has a sister. It cannot make sense. The killer, where did he come from? I look for footprints, for fingerprints. There is nothing. It’s like a bird came down, shhhhp.”

He paced a bit. “You cannot say he heard the girl screaming and came to save her and had a big knife and cut off a head and closed it up. It’s like not possible. There was a plan to do this, you must agree. So what, he’s hiding in the bushes, waiting for someone to rape a girl, with special tools? It isn’t logical. I conclude, the man who tried to rape the girl, somebody else was following him. But this is not logical, either. How does the killer know what this guy will do?”

“It’s not logical, unless they already knew each other.”

“Hah?”

Jacob elaborated on the Creeper killings.

Jan paled by shades, until he said, “Ach jo.”

“Yup.”

“This is sick.”

“Yup.”

“You think your guy, he killed my guy? And then someone kills him?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob said. “Right now it’s all I got.”

Jan nodded politely, but his expression said: Tell me another fairy tale.

“Please tell me you got DNA.”

“This requires special permission.”

“Which you couldn’t obtain.”

“No.”

“We could sample the remains.”

“If nobody claims after one month, they are going to the crematorium.”

“Shit. Shit. Fuck.”

“I am sorry, Jacob.”

“Not your fault.”

Jan made a sorrowful face that suggested that everything was his fault.

“You don’t remember anything similar, either in Prague or another city?”

“No, no, I told you, we don’t have this in Czech Republic.”

“Now you sound like the Board of Tourism.”

“We have solution rate of ninety percent. Always when we come, the guy is still there. He is too drunk to leave.”

“Better than drive-bys.”

“Drive-by?”

“Gangs,” Jacob said. “They shoot out of cars.”

“Ah, we have gangs, too. They are not so bad like American gangs. They steal bicycles, to sell over the border, in Poland. They make pervitin.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Jan searched for the word. “You know the show, Breaking Bad.”

“Meth.”

“Yes, meth.” Jan paused. “I enjoy this show very much.”

They made a circuit of the building, stepping through a thicket littered with cigarette butts and crushed cans, and ending at Maiselova Street. Jacob spied CCTV cameras mounted at the main entrance. Jan shook his head.

“They are not real. I asked the security man for the tape. ‘There is no tape, we don’t have money for this.’”

The synagogue didn’t open for well over an hour. A number of tourists were already out front snapping away.

Jan said, “I had one idea. The security man told me on Friday night before the murder, a British man came to prayers. They didn’t let him in, because he’s acting suspicious. I started to investigate. The same week, there is a hotel manager complaining to the police about a British tourist who didn’t pay his bill. It’s not unusual, people do this, but the manager was like very upset, calling very often, because the man stayed for a month.”

“What makes you think it could be the same guy?”

“I talked to the manager, he said this man, Heap, left all his clothing.”

“Heap.”

“This is like his name.”

“Uh-huh. Did you show him the picture of the head? The manager, I mean.”

“Of course not. This would create a big sensation. I am supposed to be quiet.”

“I take it you didn’t contact the British embassy, either.”

“If they come to us to say, ‘Our citizen is missing,’ okay. But this never happened. Two weeks, I’m starting to make phone calls, my boss brings me to his office. ‘You have a new job, sex trafficking.’ Boom. I am on airplane to U.S.”

“And that’s that.”

“Yes,” Jan said. “Cockblock.”

“So what’s the official story?”

“The tall men gave me a paper to sign. The man tried to rape the girl. She escaped, the man became scared and tried to climb up the ladder to hide in the synagogue.”

“Hence the open door.”

“Yes. Then he fell down.”

“Severing his head?”

“Yes, I know.”

“And sealing it? And writing Hebrew letters on the ground?”

“I know. I said I wouldn’t sign this. Then they told me I am going to lose my job. I feel like a criminal, but what can I do? I have my family. I sign.”

Jacob nodded to show he would’ve felt the same — and done the same.

He looked up at the shul’s saw-toothed façade, a frozen flame reaching against the burnished blue morning.

“Can I ask you a personal question? Are you Jewish?”

“I am atheist. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob said. But he was remembering Mallick’s words. It’s your background I’m interested in. Were Jewish cops so rare in Prague? Or perhaps they — whoever they were — had gone with the young lieutenant, expecting him to be compliant.

He took out his notepad. “Do me a favor? Contact information for the security guy and the girl? The hotel, too.”

Jan hesitated.

“I’ll keep your name out of it. I promise.”

While Jan took the pad and wrote, Jacob consulted the black-and-gold clockface on an adjacent building and saw that it was, impossibly, four p.m.

Then he realized his error: the characters were Hebrew letters, the clock hands reversed, making it eight a.m.

Jan returned the pad. He’d printed three names: Peter Wichs, Havel (Pension Karlova), Klaudia Navrátilová. Beside the latter two were addresses.

“The guard, I’ll send you his number, it is on my computer. The hotel is close, you can walk there. The manager, I don’t know his family name. The girl, she quit the synagogue, now she’s working at this place, a café.”

“How’s her English?”

“Maybe you will need a translator.”

Jacob looked at him hopefully.

“I apologize,” Jan said. “I must go to work.”

Jacob cut him some slack. As it stood, he’d put the guy in a tight spot. “I get it. Thanks. And — any crime scene pictures you can text me? I need something to show these people.”

Jan cracked his knuckles, flicked his flimsy beard. Finally: “Yes, okay. This case is not mine. I am finished, but you... good luck, Jacob.”

They shook hands, and Jan left him watching the clock, time running backward.