The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter thirty-six

Peter hung a right out of the office, stopping to unlock an unmarked door. He flicked a switch, and blue fluorescent tubes limned a stone staircase that wound down and out of sight.

“After you,” he said.

“That’s the garret?”

“The mikveh,” Peter said. “Anyone who goes up must immerse first.”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s not a choice,” Peter said.

Jacob hesitated, then started down the rough-hewn steps through soggy air. The odor of groundwater detectable everywhere in the shul grew stronger and developed a spiky, chemical overtone: chlorine. He was hyperconscious of the guard following close behind — close enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck, close enough to give Jacob a good hard shove and send him tumbling, broken legs, broken neck, broken back.

The stairs ended at a tiled basement equipped with a fiberglass stall shower and a raw pine vanity. A basket of mismatched towels sat on the floor beside a rice paper screen.

Through an archway Jacob saw the mikveh, a six-foot cube hewn into the floor, filled with shimmering water.

“You don’t think we’re cutting it a little close to Shabbat?”

“All the more reason not to delay,” Peter said.

He took a towel and went behind the screen. His backlit shape contorted as he stripped. Reemerging bare-chested, lower body wrapped in the towel, he turned on the shower. While the water warmed, he stepped to the vanity to clip his nails, brush his teeth with a disposable brush, and gargle with mouthwash from a paper cup. Once steam had begun to billow from the shower, he put the towel on a hook and stepped into the stall, soaping himself from a wall-mount dispenser. Naked, he looked vulnerable, with smooth shins and collapsed buttocks.

At least now Jacob knew Peter wasn’t carrying a concealed weapon of his own.

The guard stepped out, dripping, and presented himself for inspection. “Okay?”

“Good to go.”

In the adjoining room, Peter climbed into the mikveh and waded to the center. He glanced at Jacob, held his breath, and dropped down, his pale shape rippling and distorting beneath the surface.

While Jacob watched, it occurred to him that at no point had Peter said This is a ritual bath or Check me for stray hairs or Make sure I’m completely submerged. These were ceremonial fine points known only to someone with a fair amount of religious instruction. So far as Peter was concerned, Jacob wasn’t even Jewish. Jacob was the most popular male name in America. He could be Episcopalian or Zen Buddhist or Scientologist or what he really was, agnostic.

Peter stayed under for a solid twenty count, surfacing with red eyes. “Your turn.”

Jacob hurried through the prep, covering himself with a towel whenever possible. Approaching the mikveh, he toed the water and winced: it was freezing.

He tossed his towel aside and in he went, gasping, his testicles scrambling for cover, his chest constricting as he forced his knees to bend.

The cold surrounded him, a cell of ice carved to his exact dimensions.

Unable to tolerate it any longer, he burst upward, newborn; tingling, red, irate.

“How do you stand it,” he said, clambering out.

“The water comes directly from the river,” Peter said.

“Doesn’t make it any warmer.”

Peter smiled and handed him a fresh towel.

Jacob had logged countless hours in synagogues. Few in women’s sections. None in one so depressing. More fluorescent tubing cast a sepulchral glow. Rust swallowed the hinges of the folding chairs, ensuring that they would never be folded up again. He could hardly make out the sanctuary through the skimpy viewing portals. He asked Peter if women actually came to pray.

“Mostly tourists.”

“Can’t say I blame them. It’s like a prison back here.”

“You’re very cynical, Detective Lev.”

“Part of the job description.”

“It won’t help you here,” Peter said.

He drew back the purple curtain on a second door. Behind it lay a cramped, low-ceilinged room roughly the size of a phone booth.

“You don’t lock it?”

“Nobody can enter without permission,” Peter said.

“People must be tempted.”

“That’s why the entrance is through the women’s section.” Peter clicked on the flashlight, and they stepped in.

“Some might say women are more prone to temptation than men,” Jacob said. He could feel the heat of the guard’s body; he breathed in the man’s river-damp scent. “Adam and Eve?”

“Maybe it was that way originally,” Peter said. He shut the curtain, shut the door, and trained the flashlight on a loop of rope hanging from the ceiling. “Step aside, please.”

Jacob had time enough to press himself against the wall before the guard reached up and tugged on the rope.

A trapdoor opened, and a ladder slid out, showering them with dust that plastered their wet heads. Jacob coughed and waved his hand in front of his face, peering up through stinging eyes. Above him stretched a dust-choked shaft, like the inside of a grain silo but far narrower. The ladder extended at least another ten feet; beyond that, the flashlight surrendered to darkness.

Peter put his foot on the bottom rung. “Up we go.”

The ladder creaked and vibrated and rained grime as they climbed. Within moments, Jacob was panting, sweat feathering his lower back. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to do anything this demanding. The academy, probably. Since then: too much liquor. Too many hot dogs. He was a desk jockey.

Still, he’d always considered himself sound of body, if not of mind, and he couldn’t recall losing wind this quickly.

The flashlight bobbed above him, disclosing cobwebs and stray nails and a thickening firmament of dust. Occasionally the beam swung back down, blinding him momentarily, leaving him groping without confidence for the next rung. He pictured the exterior door, gauged its height in his mind. Three stories. They should have reached the garret by now, but Peter went on, dogged as faith, humming a one-note drone, the slap of his shoes setting an increasingly demanding pace, the flashlight guttering.

Gasping for air, Jacob called for him to slow down.

“You’re doing fine, Detective.”

He didn’t feel fine. His thighs ached and his forearms bubbled, as though he’d climbed a high-altitude mile. Heat flashed over him; he was having a heart attack, a panic attack, or both.

“How much farther is it?” he yelled hoarsely.

The answer came from a great distance. “Not far.”

The flashlight winked out, immersing Jacob in a black as total as death.

Panting, he hooked one arm over a rung, tugged out his phone, clutching it in one sweaty hand as he resumed his ascent. Its blue glow penetrated less than a foot into the dust; it shut off every ten seconds. He kept reviving it, glancing at the screen. He was getting no service.

It was 6:13 p.m. They were never going to make it down before Shabbat.

And still Peter kept climbing.

To keep his anxiety at bay, Jacob began counting rungs: thirty, fifty, a hundred. He couldn’t see the flashlight but he could hear the humming, chased after it, his heart straining, every step a torment. When he next checked the time, he saw that it had not changed, and he told himself that the lack of reception was affecting the operation of the clock, although he knew very well that the clock ran on its own internal circuit; so maybe the problem was the dust, a special dust, a toxic dust, maybe it had clogged up the phone and caused it to freeze, an explanation he accepted because that alone could account for the fact that it remained 6:13 after he’d counted sixty more rungs, and again, and again, until the phone refused to light up, either out of juice or else the dust was so enveloping that he couldn’t see the screen, even with it pressed right up against his face. He had lost count of the rungs, hand over hand without end. The humming had died, too. He called out and the close echo told him that, as he could not hear Peter, Peter could not hear him; nobody could; he faltered, knowing that he would never reach the top. Nor could he go back down. He was alone. There was nothing to do but let his fingers uncurl and his toes unbend and release himself into the abyss.

Weeping, he grasped the next rung.

A glowing gap opened in the cosmos. Syrupy orange light sang to him.

The dust knitted itself into cloth; folded over itself, forming a warm moist pumping canal that sucked him upward, and as he drew nearer, the gap widened and the light streamed down, carrying voices. He stretched and strove toward the sound, suffocating, skull unknitting and segmenting and deforming, and the voices multiplied: forty-five, seventy-one, two hundred thirty-one, six hundred thirteen, eighteen thousand, a thousand by a thousand voices, every one of them unique and discernible and strange, the light spreading oceanically, a terrible buzzing chorus, and the voices swelled to twelve by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by three hundred sixty-five thousand myriads, the thrum of innumerable wings.