The Golem of Paris

Chapter twenty-eight

Even then, she wouldn’t say the name out loud.

“We had a deal, Zina.”

She had turned pale. She took his pen and pad with trembling hands and wrote.

Тремсин

Jacob said, “English?”

She hesitated, then added Tremsin.

“That’s good,” he said. “That’s his last name?”

Nod.

“First name?”

She scrawled.

Arkady.

“Arkady Tremsin.”

A violent tremor ran through her.

“All right,” he said. “Now tell me what happened.”

“I told you, I was not there.”

“You must have seen something or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Zina glanced at Katie in the unmarked’s rear window. “Night, I am cleaning oven. There is knock. ‘Go away, we are closed.’ Knocking, knocking. I go out, man is there.”

“Tremsin.”

She shuddered. “Another.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know him.”

“What does Tremsin have to do with it, then?”

“He works for him.”

“You know that because...”

“People say.”

“Which people?”

“No one,” she said. “Everyone. It’s ten years ago.”

“So you let this other guy in.”

“He was not asking permission.”

“Why did he come to you?”

She said, “He was coming few times before. To buy food.” A tart smile. “He says he is here with his boss, on vacation. His boss says I make vatrushki like home.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“He told me, ‘Go home.’ I went.”

“Did he give you anything? Money?”

Zina bit her lip. “No.”

He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t want to shut her down. “Okay. Go on.”

“In morning I come to work, there are many police cars.”

“He used one of your garbage cans,” Jacob said. “To prop the mother’s body.”

“I never saw nothing.”

“Why didn’t you tell the cops about him?”

She stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

“What did he look like?”

She shook her head. She had begun to withdraw.

“Did he kill them inside the bakery?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there blood?”

“No,” she said.

“What did—”

“No more,” she said.

He started to press, but her face had hardened and she was looking toward the unmarked. She said, “I can’t save her always.”

He’d hit the limit. “All right,” he said. “I’ll give her to you.”

“She won’t like this,” Zinaida Moskvina said. “She will like you better.”

Back home, he opened the laptop, the bourbon he’d earlier denied himself tucked between two couch cushions. It was two-thirty in the morning.

He typed in Arkady Tremsin.

The sheer number of hits gave him a sense of the scale of Zina’s fear.

Arkady Lavrentyevich Tremsin, age sixty-three, founder of Metallurgy TechAnsch ZAO, one of Russia’s largest refineries. Wikipedia, citing Forbes, put his net worth at $850 million.

Three years ago, he had abruptly resigned and moved to Paris. The reason for his departure was subject to enthusiastic conjecture, everything from a sex scandal to financial hanky-panky. He’d kept a low profile ever since, shunning public appearances and giving no interviews. The past spring, the Russian government had frozen his assets and seized a controlling share of TechAnsch, citing failure to pay tax. Lawsuits were ongoing.

However much money he’d left behind, the presumption was he had hidden plenty more in offshore accounts — enough to ride out exile in luxury.

Image search returned a pinkish man with melting features. It was not so much that he was fat, but that he lacked foundations; the underlying structures were sunken, resulting in a flat, indistinct mien. More recent photos were pixelated, long-lens shots of a white head, surrounded by bodyguards, as it ducked into a limousine.

Susan Lomax might be able to positively ID him. In the meantime, Jacob reviewed the notes from their conversation.

Big and tall; ugly black ring.

Nestled amid the shoulders and elbows and marble faces, Tremsin was about the same height as his bodyguards. No shots of his hands, but no big deal. Appearances changed. In the end, it was his pattern of behavior that carried the most weight.

Jacob began excavating the past.

The guy was nowhere, and then everywhere, and then nowhere again.

Prior to 2002, he seemed not to exist. Then his name began popping up on finance blogs and in industrial trade journals, most of them in Russian. Jacob hobbled along, leaning on translation websites, e-mailing Mallick to request an interpreter ASAP.

The mother lode came in the form of a fifteen-thousand-word profile, originally published in Novaya Gazeta in 2006, later serialized by the British Financial Times.

It opened with a description of the flat Tremsin had grown up in, twenty-eight square meters in Moscow’s Kapotnya District, overlooking the mammoth oil refinery where his father worked. As a child, he had suffered lung problems and for a period was confined to bed. His mother left a bookkeeping job to care for him full-time, enforcing a grueling regimen of calisthenics and rote memorization, so that little Arkasha returned to school physically robust and three years ahead of his peers.

The arrangement of the murder scene rose up in Jacob’s mind.

Mother and son, in wide-eyed concentration; a lesson in progress.

What kind of pressure pushed a child that far out in front of the pack?

The author of the piece, Natalia Honcharenko, struggled to contain her distaste for her subject, writing in a tone that periodically flared from cynicism into outright paranoia. An inevitable flaw, Jacob thought, of a culture so long lied to.

At some point, though, even she had to cop to Tremsin’s brilliance. His former instructors at Moscow State University recalled him with awe. At twenty-three, he’d earned a first-level doctorate in applied chemistry, an unheard-of feat.

Jacob examined the inset photo.

Kandidat Tremsin wore mutton chops and boxy eyeglasses.

In 1975, he moved to Leningrad, ostensibly to take up a teaching position. Honcharenko claimed otherwise, citing an anonymous source who put Tremsin at the 401st KGB school. It was there, she wrote, that he had met and befriended the man who would later enable his vault to the top of the food chain.

Starting in 1977, he went to work for Norilsk, the Soviet government’s gigantic nickel concern. His official title was research scientist; he was the principal author on dozens of papers, coauthor of dozens more. In 1978 he earned a second-level doctorate, becoming a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and receiving a civilian medal for “contributions to the development of techniques leading to greater efficiency in the electrolytic refinement of copper.”

Honcharenko dismissed the Norilsk job as a cover. His real work, she alleged, took place at Laboratory 12, the KGB’s division for poisons and chemical weapons.

As before, her proof was thin. A handful of KGB files had been opened to the public, but most remained classified.

One indication of Tremsin’s special status lay in his freedom of movement, far greater than that of the average Soviet citizen. His name turned up on the rosters of chemistry conferences across the globe; he’d spent academic year 1978–79 in Paris, lecturing at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, as part of a Franco-Soviet exchange program.

A brief marriage produced no children and ended in divorce. Lingering acrimony prompted his ex-wife, who worked at the Ministry of Information and Press, to denounce him as a homosexual — a crime punishable by up to five years’ hard labor.