The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter forty-six

Norton’s phone broke the silence.

“It’s Branch,” she said. “He’s going to have my head.” Then, coloring: “Sorry. Poor choice of words, that.”

She answered. “Yes, right away, sir. Sorry.” Hanging up. “I’ve got to get back.”

Before they left, Jacob copied down the statement of purpose, then took a picture of the drawing, checking to ensure that it had come out in the low light.

Norton punched the lift button. “I’ll stop by the college and ask Jimmy about yearbooks.”

“Thanks. See you tonight?”

“Eight o’clock. I trust you’ll be able to entertain yourself till then.”

“Do my best,” said Jacob.

“What’s it to be till then? Punting on the Thames?”

“Not quite.”

The librarian in charge of the Bodleian’s Special Collections was a surly ostrich of a woman named R. Waters. The regular reading room was undergoing renovation and her interim domain was the basement of Radcliffe Science Library, an ill-lit concrete catacomb blockaded by portable humidifiers and dehumidifiers waging a war of attrition.

Unable to find fault with Jacob’s temporary access card, she begrudgingly showed him to the computer kiosk. A search of the electronic catalog for the Maharal, limited to documents prior to 1650, yielded a single entry, the Prague letter.

Jacob asked if there was any way to tell who had examined it previously.

Waters sniffed. “That information is privileged.”

The document request slip she thrust at him required a signature guaranteeing that he would not eat, drink, chew gum, write in ink, take photographs, or use a mobile phone. As a temporary user, he was also forbidden from requesting more than one item at a time or more than four items per day, although, as R. Waters added, that would be unlikely, given that it was nearing half-three, and the collection closed at five.

Jacob traded away his rights for a pair of white cotton gloves and an eraserless golf pencil. He waited, sitting at a padded-leathertop table while the document came up from storage.

At four o’clock sharp, it arrived, suspended in an archival board folder borne on the librarian’s palms. She opened the flaps with a snide flourish, withdrawing to a nearby workstation so she could spy on him.

He stared at the letter anxiously without reading it, aware of precious minutes ticking by. It measured about five inches square, three of its corners eaten away, its edges mottled, its center water-stained and shot through with wormholes, so fragile that he held his breath, afraid to exhale and scatter it into dust.

He held his gloved hand over the ink, millimeters from the paper that had touched the skin of the great genius of Israel.

R. Waters didn’t miss her opportunity. “I must ask that you please refrain from touching the material excessively, sir.”

“Sorry.” He tucked his hand in his lap. The great genius of Israel had atrocious penmanship, careless about keeping his lines straight. Letters thinned where his quill had run dry, blotched after he’d redipped it.

These imperfections made Jacob feel like a trespasser, a peeping Tom; they also helped restore his equilibrium. The great genius of Israel had been a man, a real man — not a character, scissored from history. He’d eaten, belched, used the bathroom. Had good days and bad days, found himself subject to the push and pull of right and wrong.

You’re very cynical, Detective Lev.

Jacob switched on the magnifying lamp and bent over the lens.

The going was excruciatingly slow. The letter was a couple of hundred words at most, but the script was hurried, the gaps numerous, the Hebrew poetic and obscure. The idea of Reggie Heap plumbing this material for inspiration was outlandish. Jacob, with a yeshiva education, would need hours, if not days, to fully decipher it. He’d gotten through the date, the salutation, and half of the first line before deciding that his time was better spent transcribing, allowing him to work later, at his own pace.

He opened his notepad and began to copy, his attention wholly on the shape of the words and not on their meaning. That was challenge enough.

R. Waters checked her wristwatch and clucked her tongue.

At last he came to the signature.

Judah Loew ben Bezalel.

Jacob was about to put his hands up — done! — when his breath caught.

It meant lion. The English rendering, Loew, was little more than convention, German processed into Hebrew, reprocessed into English, shedding its vowels along the way.

It could easily be read as Lowe, or Leyva, or Levai.

Your name, it means “heart” in Hebrew, I think. Lev.

By his own admission, Peter Wichs spoke hardly any Hebrew. That was why he kept the security log in English, the better for him to communicate with his Israeli subordinates.

Yet he’d felt the need to tutor Jacob.

I know what it means.

Ah. Then I think perhaps I have nothing more to offer you.

Jacob picked up the golf pencil and wrote the word for heart in his notepad—

The simplicity of Hebrew reduced it to two letters: lamed and bet. Bet was the first letter of the Five Books of Moses — the initial letter of Bereshit, Genesis. In the beginning. And lamed was the last letter of its last word — Yisrael. Israel.

Two letters that completed a cycle. Encasing the heart of the matter.

It made for a nice metaphor. Jacob Lev was a man of heart.

Except, he wasn’t.

That wasn’t the way he’d been taught to spell his surname.

Two distinct Hebrew letters made a v sound. What he had learned — what Sam had taught him, what Jacob now wrote — was not lamed bet, but lamed vav—

And, in turn, the letter vav had two pronunciations: v, as a consonant, and o, as a vowel.

Which gave his name, as it was spelled, two pronunciations.

Lev.

Or Loew.

The German w, the slurred oe. Lev. Classic Ellis Island Special. The wonder was that it had taken him two days to figure it out.

Make that thirty-two years.

There, in the middle of the temporary home of Special Collections, Jacob burst into giddy, hysterical laughter.

He didn’t know his own name.

“Kindly lower your voice.”

He quieted down, his stomach muscles twitching.

He craved alcohol.

So he shared a name with a famous rabbi. So what? There were plenty of Loews in the world. And even if he really was a great-great-great-great-whatever, who cared? Families grew exponentially. He’d once read that there were something like a thousand Rockefellers alive, no more than four generations removed from the original wealth, most of them ordinary middle-class Americans — a few of them poor. People reverted to the mean.

The Maharal had died in the early 1600s. Figure twenty-five years to a generation — maybe less, because people got married early and died young in those days.

Sixteen generations, eighteen. At best he was one of tens of thousands of descendants.

Even so, his father’s obsession with the Maharal took on new meaning. Much more than academic curiosity.

Then why say nothing about it? You’d think it would be a point of pride.

He shut his eyes and Sam appeared before him, interchanging rapidly with the clay model Peter Wichs had shown him.

The image shifted to Wichs, studying him. Processing him. Recognizing him?

But Jacob didn’t look like Sam.

He took after Bina.

You are the detective, Jacob Lev.

He had taken the guard’s use of his full name as a quirk of speech or an affectation. It’s your name, isn’t it? Now it began to feel like a rote lesson, a drill, the sounds scratched over and over again into the clay of Jacob’s mind, until they took.

Jacoblevjacoblevjacoblev.

Why did you let me up here?

You asked.

I’m sure a lot of people ask.

Not a lot of policemen.

Every Hebrew letter corresponded to a number. Lamed was thirty. Vav was six.

A durable legend had attached to that number: in every generation, thirty-six hidden righteous people sustained the world.

Your father the lamed-vavnik.

Anyone who thinks he’s a lamed-vavnik is by definition not a lamed-vavnik.

I don’t think. I know.

Grandiose thinking: another sign of incipient madness.

The pencil snapped between his fingers. He could no longer restrain himself; he burst into laughter.

“Sir.”

He turned to the librarian to apologize and she recoiled, as if she perceived in him something unspeakable. He stood up and she scurried behind the desk; he asked her to return his possessions and she held the basket at arm’s length. When he thanked her, she didn’t reply, and as he tripped toward the stairwell, he heard the door to Special Collections slam and bolt.