The Golem of Paris

Chapter twenty-nine

Jacob stared at the screen, which seemed to be molting, letters falling like scales.

She went to Prague.

She was never the same after that.

He shifted the laptop to the table, killed the bourbon, headed to the kitchen. Along the way, the empty slipped from his grasp, thudding to the carpet.

Uncapping a fresh bottle, he took slow, steady drafts until the liquor hovered waist-high in the bottle. He set it on the counter and returned to the sofa.

The screen saver had kicked in, LAPD shield bouncing from corner to corner. He touched the space bar and the text reappeared like a slap.

Honcharenko could locate no official record of Tremsin’s activities in Czechoslovakia. She had, however, managed to track down a requisition form bearing his signature, from a Prague psychiatric hospital called Bohnice. A former nurse at the facility — speaking on condition of anonymity, like every other source — named him as the head of the inpatient ward, starting in the spring of 1981.

Perhaps the nurse was scared, or else she had things on her conscience that didn’t sit well: she declined to detail Tremsin’s work on the ward, leaving Honcharenko to indulge in more suggestive speculation.

Jacob went back.

Eighty-one through eighty-three.

Overlapping Bina’s visit.

She was never the same after that.

The remainder of the article covered the periods pre— and post — Berlin Wall; Tremsin’s patient accumulation of friends and resources; the rise of the first wave of oligarchs under Yeltsin and their dismantling at Putin’s hands. Between 1999 and 2004, the list of Russia’s richest men turned over completely, leaving Tremsin bobbing comfortably in the middle of the pack.

All the same, he maintained a relatively modest lifestyle. It was chemistry that Tremsin loved; the fact that his passion happened to generate reams of cash was immaterial. Honcharenko played up the contrast between his childhood home and his current residence, a seven-bedroom flat on Moscow’s Ostozhenka Street that sat unoccupied most months. Typically, Tremsin preferred to stay at his dacha, driving distance to the TechAnsch campus in Shchyolkovo. Foremen cited him as a frequent visitor to the refinery floor.

Jacob had a hard time seeing him as the driver of a Gerhardt Falke S.

Maybe he’d brought it to a friend’s house for dinner, in lieu of wine.

Please enjoy these eleven hundred horsepower as a token of my gratitude.

Published several years before his fall from grace, the article ended on an ambivalent note.

What will become of Russia if it is populated by men like Tremsin, men for whom nothing is too costly, and for whom nothing has value?

Hoping for follow-up, Jacob opened the Novaya Gazeta homepage, clicked the little British flag to bring up the English-language edition. He typed Natalia Honcharenko’s name into the search box.

The first item that came up was from 2008.

Not by Honcharenko, but about her.

Jacob scrolled down the list of articles to find when the story broke.

June 2007, about nine months after Honcharenko’s profile on Tremsin first appeared.

A masked man rode up on a motorcycle as she left her building. He pulled a handgun, shot her once in the back of the head, twice more when she fell, and drove off.

No shortage of suspects. Therein lay the problem. She was an investigative journalist in the new Russia. Threats came with the territory, and pissing off powerful people was her stock-in-trade. Among those she had vivisected in print, Tremsin was neither the most prominent nor the most notorious.

Jacob searched for hours without finding further information about Tremsin’s tenure in Czechoslovakia. It stood to reason that few writers would want to tackle the subject, given what had happened to Honcharenko.

He needed that interpreter, badly. He sent Mallick a second request, then returned to the FT profile, reading and rereading the Prague section, scrutinizing every turn of phrase with Talmudic fervor. He felt like he was tilting a photograph, trying to fudge the angle: it was all tantalizing surface. He googled TechAnsch, Norilsk, Laboratory 12. Plenty to read. Nothing of substance.

He googled vlaštovka.

The first line of the first hit bounced him out of his seat.

Native to every continent except Australia and Antarctica, the barn swallow is the most common species of swallow in the world.

Sweating, he clicked the link.

The Web page showed a picture of a little bird, perched delicately on a branch.

Mashed potatoes, rising to life.

His mother, choking on bread.

Swallowing it down.

She had been talking to him all along.

He hadn’t been listening.

A hot tide rose in his own throat.

He stumbled to the bathroom and heaved up fifty dollars’ worth of booze. He rinsed his mouth until it stopped burning; tore off his shirt and ran a cold washcloth over his body.

In the bedroom he lay down on the unmade sheets. He gave himself ninety minutes to sleep, setting an alarm for eight-thirty in the morning, late afternoon in Prague.

Jacob had lieutenant Jan Chrpa’s number listed in his phone under Czech Detective. He didn’t know if it was current. The voice that answered ahoj sounded different, free of wheezy edge. But the background track was identical: kids, screaming.

How long had they been at it? Two years running?

Jacob said, “Can’t you turn on the television or something?”

There was a pause.

“This is the problem,” Jan said. “They fight about what to watch.”

A bark in Czech, a dip in the noise, a return to full strength within moments.

“Hold please,” Jan muttered.

Jacob stretched out on his couch. He’d taken four Advil and eaten a piece of dry toast; physically, he felt a little less horrible, but his nightmares continued to reverberate.

An attic, a garden, Bina’s twitching hands.

As he listened to the bickering fade, it occurred to him that he knew next to nothing about Jan’s personal life, other than that he had a sister. Originally he’d assumed the kids to be Jan’s own. Later he’d changed his mind and decided they were younger siblings. He still didn’t have the answer. He didn’t know if Jan was married or gay or lived with his parents or what. They’d talked on the phone a couple of times and spent a single morning together, reconstructing a brutal crime.

Yet he knew that Jan would remember him. What they shared was indelible. More than victory, it was trauma that united men.

Jan came back on the line. “I’m happy to hear from you.”

“Same here. You sound good.”

“I’m okay, yes.”

Jacob was glad to take a few minutes to shoot the shit. He asked after Jan’s sister, Lenka, and got an annoyed sigh in return.

“She is becoming a police officer.”

“No kidding. She went through with it?”

“I told her this is a terrible idea. She doesn’t listen. For this I blame you.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“After you left, she was talking about you very often. I told her, forget this guy, he is bad news.”

“I’d like to be offended, but you’re probably right.”

“Of course I am right. You are dangerous. You come to Prague, you ask questions I don’t want to answer. I answer you anyway. Then you leave and I don’t hear jack shit.”

“Your English has really improved,” Jacob said.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“After the case broke, they shut me down. I couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

“Cockblock,” Jan said.

Jacob laughed, releasing some of the tension in his chest. “I wanted to call. They were monitoring my phone and e-mail. I didn’t want to cause more problems for you.”

“It’s okay. I forgive you. But, Jacob, it was a very weird thing. Before I met you, I was in a lot of trouble.”

“I remember.”

“Then, two, three months after you went, my boss, he called me to his office. ‘Congratulations, you are getting a promotion.’”

“Huh.”

“Yes, but it is more weird.” An uptick in Jan’s breathing, a hint of the former rasp. “Before, I was poručík, lieutenant. After this comes nadporučík. My boss, he tells me they are making him major, and I will be kapitán. This is not normal.”

“After I was pulled off the case, they gave me ten thousand dollars,” Jacob said.

There was a pause before Jan asked, “Who are these people?”

Jacob didn’t like lying to him. He said, “I don’t know how to answer you,” hoping the distinction between that and I don’t know would be lost.

Jan grunted. “I never learned who killed this person.”

Jacob recited LAPD’s official version of the story: acting with an accomplice, Richard Pernath was responsible for the murder of a former accomplice, Terrence Florack. Scotland Yard, accepting this explanation, had closed the file on the slaying of yet another accomplice, British national Reggie Heap, on foreign soil.

“I don’t think you’re telling me everything,” Jan said.

Jacob said, “Believe me: it’s for your benefit.”

Jan was silent a moment. “The person who did it. He’s getting punished?”

Jacob thought about the sorrow in Mai’s eyes in the instant before she left him.

“No doubt about it,” he said.

Jan absorbed the details of the Duvall/White homicide without comment.

Jacob said, “This guy Tremsin was in Prague in the early eighties. He ran a psych ward at a place called Bohnice.”

“I know it,” Jan said.

“It’s still there?”

“Yes, yes. They have many crazy people.”

“Can you get in touch with them?”

“I will try. You wonder if Tremsin’s doing the same thing here.”

“It’s a question worth asking.”

“I agree. But it will not be simple to learn. After Communism, there is a lot of confusion. The files are not complete, many were destroyed.”

Jacob pictured the Vollmer Archive, writ huge. “I get it.”

“This is terrible,” Jan said, “the mother and the son.”

Jacob saw Bina cradling the photo of Thomas White Jr.

The mutilated face.

The endless stare.

She recognized it.

She’d seen it before.

“What I think,” Jan was saying, “is to talk to ÚDV. This is the division for special cases that could not be investigated before, for political reasons.”

“If Tremsin was working for the KGB, he probably had local protection.”

“Yes, no, maybe. We have the files for StB, not KGB. There was not a lot of cooperation, they did not like each other. Did you ask the Russians?”

“I’m waiting on a translator. I have a feeling they’re not going to talk so easily.”

“I think you are right.”

“Do me a favor? Ask around anyway. Anything helps. Whatever you can dig up.”

“You are coming back to Prague?”

“To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it. I’d love to, though. Someday.” Jacob laughed. “I still owe you a beer.”

Jan said, “Now you owe me two.”