The Golem of Paris

Chapter thirty-five

The address of Arkady Tremsin’s residence was an open secret. Parisian real estate websites had noted the purchase by an anonymous buyer, in 2008, of a six-story Beaux Arts mansion on Rue Poussin, near the Villa Montmorency. Set well back from the street, the house was largely obscured by a high sandstone wall topped by curlicued ironwork, dense boxwoods plugging the gaps. The place had previously served as a finishing school; bloggers had dubbed its current incarnation Le Petit Kremlin.

“He saw it coming,” Jacob said.

They stood catercorner, camera and map conspicuous, peering through midafternoon gloom like ordinary tourists battling jet lag. That was the intent, at least.

“He bought knowing he might have to get out in a hurry.”

“Any idea why?” Schott asked.

“I read in a few places that he pissed off the wrong people. But it’s all hearsay. Most of the oligarchs who Putin drove out moved to London. A couple to Israel. Tremsin’s an oddball. He’s second wave, and he chose to come here.”

Jacob reoriented the map. “The Russian embassy, where the vic worked? Mile and a half north.”

Schott perked up. “Oh yeah?”

More real cop in him than Jacob had thought. “Want to guess what’s around the corner? Adjacent to both?”

“The park where they found the bodies.”

“If I didn’t know any better, Paulie, I’d say you were starting to care.”

They crossed over to walk the length of the frontage. Jacob reached up on tiptoes and stuck his hand through the bars, trying to part the branches.

“You’re screwing up his landscaping,” Schott said.

“I want to know if he has a car back there.”

“I’m guessing more than one. Anyway, you won’t be able to see crap.”

Jacob shook out his wet coat sleeve. “All right, never mind.”

But the mansion’s central gate was sliding open, a pack of heavyset men funneling down the driveway.

“Nicely done,” Schott muttered.

A towering figure stepped forward, his coat billowing in the wind. “Propriété privée. Foutez-moi le camp.”

“Come on,” Schott said to Jacob. “We’re trespassing.”

“He doesn’t own the sidewalk.”

“He might.”

“Couple of meatheads frighten you?”

“I count eight.”

The leader clapped gloved hands. He was a crude assemblage, long-limbed and asymmetrical, a sizable plug of scar tissue jutting from the left side of his neck.

“Plus vite que ça,” he called.

Jacob jerked his thumb at the property. “Nice place,” he said. “Yours?”

A pair of men started to advance, but the leader stopped them. He smiled at Jacob and drew back his coat a few inches, showing the butt of a gun.

“Allez,” he said.

“Au revoir,” Jacob said.

Their final stop was the police commissariat on Avenue Mozart, a ten-minute walk north from Tremsin’s house. Clearing the metal detector, they beheld a chic foyer, curvaceous and hopeful in aluminum and frosted glass, as if to declare that good design would save the day.

The smell told the truth. Urine and bleach and defeat.

While the front desk paged Pelletier, Jacob idled by the bulletin board, browsing antidrug and antigang posters whose cute color schemes and popping exclamation points gave them a half-serious aspect. He found himself thinking they should come to L.A., see what a real gang was. Then thinking that was an odd thing to boast about.

“Detective Lev.”

Odette Pelletier was elegance sprouting through the manure. Slender and blond, with a Modigliani face, she wore tapered jeans and fringed boots that emphasized her calves. A lime-green fitness bracelet bounced on her wrist as she shook Jacob’s hand. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”

Not how’d you find me or what are you doing here. She smiled at Schott. “And you’ve brought a friend.”

Her office was a glass box shared with three other cops. She murmured and they vacated without a word.

“I apologize that it’s so cold in here,” she said. “Some idiot broke the thermostat months ago and we still can’t get it fixed.”

“We know how it goes,” Jacob said.

She smiled again. “So,” she said. “How may I help?”

“Rubbish,” she said, when Jacob told her that Breton had zeroed in on Tremsin.

“Complete and total rubbish. I was the one who wanted to tap his phones.”

“You said his name never came up,” Jacob said.

“I know what I said.”

“Why hold back?”

“Why on earth would I tell you the truth?” she said.

“You’re telling me now,” he said.

“Yes, well — if Breton’s going to try to steal credit for my work.”

“He claims he got yanked for getting too close.”

“It’s not my intention to smear a fellow police officer,” Pelletier said.

“Understood,” he said.

“The man is a catastrophe. He has stage-four pancreatic cancer, which he concealed from the department. That alone would be reason to relieve him of duty. But the decision was a long time coming. The fact is that Théo Breton has a terribly high opinion of himself, unjustified by his record.”

“I talked to him,” Jacob said. “He seemed like a serious guy.”

“I don’t suppose you have breasts, do you? I have a colleague at the Crim, a very gifted detective. She started out under Breton. She nearly quit because of the harassment, which would have been a tragedy, because at present she’s our leading cybercrime investigator. Breton runs a boys’ club. He always has.”

A blond lock swung loose. She tucked it behind her ear. “To some degree, it’s part of the culture. I wish I could pretend he was the only one. He is one of the worst, though. There have been multiple complaints filed. That’s why the parquet brought me in. They’re making an honest effort to reform the ambience.”

“I get it. But if he was handling his business—”

“That’s the point. He wasn’t. If I had time, I’d show you his dossiers. Trust me, you’d have nightmares. Ruined forensics. Loose ends.”

She had begun pulling files from a drawer, stacking them up.

“Evidence that goes missing. Evidence that ‘reappears’... The rules don’t matter. But of course they do, and now it’s up to me to review all of his arrests resulting in a sentence of more than a year. If an individual is still in prison, I have to check that, too.”

She angrily pinched an inch of paperwork, as though catching it by the scruff. “This is not the way we operate. Everything — everything — depends on the dossier. The case lives and dies by what we write up. A man like Breton can single-handedly pervert the outcome. Our priorities aren’t the same as yours. Above all, we want the truth.”

Schott spoke up: “Us, too.”

“I’m afraid I have to disagree,” she said. “You want convictions. Why do you think your prisons are so crowded?”

Jacob said, “Politics aside—”

“But you can’t put politics aside. What Théo Breton represents is a perversion of the system. We cannot abide that. The job — our job — is fundamentally one of repression. And because it is repressive, it must be tightly regulated. Breton... Four times he’s applied for transfer to the Crim. Four times they’ve turned him down. They kept telling him he was needed here, but the reality is he’s never been up to snuff.”

She got up, the tassels on her boots whipping as she paced. “I can’t believe he had the nerve to claim Tremsin as his. That was my lead. My work.”

“Where did it take you?”

“Nowhere. There’s no case against him.”

“Did you do the tap?”

“We didn’t need to. By the time the juge signed the order, we had already ruled Tremsin out. He was out of the country the week of the murder.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“A hundred percent. He was on holiday in Cyprus.”

A squall of dissent pierced the silence, as two officers dragged a man in tattered clothes down the hall.

“Does Breton know?” Jacob asked.

“Of course. He was still the lead investigator at the time. I reported to him. He wanted to place the tap regardless.”

“On what grounds?”

Pelletier smiled. “A grand conspiracy.” She threw her hands up. “It was the KGB, it was the CIA, it was the Illuminati. God knows what drugs they have him on. He’s not in his right mind. Take him seriously and you are not in your right mind.”

“The eyelids,” Jacob said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“It’s a big world, Detective. Coincidences occur.”

“Did you look at the photos I e-mailed you?”

She gestured at the cascading stack of files. “I’m a bit busy.”

Undeterred, he opened his bag. “That’s fine,” he said. “I brought them with me.”

He began pulling out pictures of Thomas White Jr.

“Detective—”

“Just look,” he said. “Look and then tell me it’s not the same.”

Pelletier ran her eyes over the violent images covering her desk. He waited for her to flinch or gag, for the involuntary beading of sweat at the hairline.

She said, “I’m not saying there isn’t a connection between your case and ours. Merely that Arkady Tremsin is not that connection.”

“Be that as it may, he’s my principal suspect, and I’d still like to talk to him.”

“What exactly do you suggest I do?” Pelletier said.

“Stand next to me. Hold up a badge.”

“There exist departments whose express function is to meet those needs. Mine is not one of them.”

“I’m not asking you to haul him in. All I want is to meet him on his own territory and study his reaction. Before I have to go home, and it ends up with the FBI and the State Department, and everyone on both sides is drowning in paperwork. Including you.”

“You’re worse than Breton,” she said.

“The truth matters to me,” he said. “Regardless of what you think.”

A beat. She returned her eyes to the photos of Marquessa and TJ.

“It’s horrible,” she said quietly. “I’m not arguing with you about that. Whether or not we’re looking for the same person, he’s a demon.”

She waved at the desk. “Put those away, please.”

He complied. “Now tell me what you have.”

“And if I refuse?”

Jacob shrugged.

“Paperwork for everyone,” she said.

He shrugged again.

She reached in a drawer. Took out a dossier. Opened it. “Listen carefully.”

Pelletier said, “Her name was Lidiya Georgieva.”

“Russian.”

“Bulgarian. You need to brush up on your Slavic, Detective. Born ’ninety-one in Pleven, left school at fifteen, pregnant soon after that. The boy’s name was Valko. I tracked down her family. Her mother said Lidiya came to Paris about a year before the murder. She held a variety of jobs, mostly cleaning. A good girl. Sent her money home.”

“Breton told me she worked at the Russian embassy.”

“Once again: information I brought to him.”

“What did the people there have to say about her?”

“She hadn’t been there long. A few months.”

“Friends here in Paris? Family?”

“No one.”

“She had a landlord, at least.”

“He was not eager to talk to us. She was in France illegally, which makes him liable for a fine for subletting to her.”

“Where was she living?”

“Clichy-sous-Bois. A suburb, quite rough. It’s on the other side of the city, and we were looking for someone in the immediate area. An opportunist.”

“What about the boy’s father?”

“Back in Sofia. They did not have a relationship.”

“That’s the same situation I’m dealing with,” Jacob said. “Single mother.”

“It’s hardly uncommon,” Pelletier said. “Men are men.”

“Or you could say the bad guy has his preferences.”

“You know, I’m beginning to enjoy this. It’s a bit like being on a game show.”

“I’m trying to understand how her son got caught up in it.”

“I’m getting to that,” she said, paging forward. “On the evening of December eleventh, there was a reception at the embassy for a trade mission. The house manager told me they had a last-minute problem. A waitress got sick. They called Lidiya to fill in. She had no one to watch Valko, so she brought him along and stuck him in a back room.”

“Was Tremsin invited to the party?” Jacob asked.

“I just told you, he was out of the country.” She closed the file. “What’s the word in English? I can’t think of it. Ah,” she said, laughing. “‘Monomaniac.’ Is that a word?”

“It’s a word,” he said. “You were saying?”

“The last person to have contact with either of the victims was another waitress, who encountered Lidiya in the stairwell around midnight. Lidiya was in a hurry, running upstairs to fetch Valko. It’s a long way back to Clichy, and she was worried about missing her bus. She asked the other waitress to sign out for her. Four days later, the bodies were found in the Bois de Boulogne.”

Jacob spread the map on her desk. “Show me where?”

Pelletier let the tip of her pen hover over a blank patch, a triangle of green ink, southeast of Allée de Longchamp. “About here.”

“The more specific you can be, the better.”

“Bring me a more specific map,” she said. “I assure you, there’s nothing to see there, now, except mud and trees.”

With his fingertip, he traced an invisible line to the embassy on Boulevard Lannes. “What is that, about half a mile?”

“Eight hundred meters.” She held up her fitness tracker. “I measured it myself.”

“How did Lidiya and her son get from there to here?”

“One can only surmise. It’s my belief that they were ambushed after they left the building, convinced or forced into a car. As I said, an opportunist.”

“Do we know for certain that they left the embassy by themselves? Did anyone actually see them?”

“If you’re wondering whether the murders could have taken place inside the embassy, the answer is no. Even on an ordinary day, it’s crawling with security, and that evening there would have been more. There are cameras everywhere.”

“Did you review the tapes?”

“Nobody at the party reported hearing shots, or a disturbance of any kind. The idea that someone could smuggle out two dead bodies amid a house full of people in tuxedos... It’s inconceivable. You must remember: the embassy is technically Russian soil. They were gracious, but they didn’t have to be. I had a finite amount of goodwill to spend, and I limited myself to questions worth asking.”

“I take it you ran down the guest list.”

“To the extent that I could. The foreign nationals who were there — members of various missions — had already departed the country by the time we identified the bodies. Which were found in a park. Which is where we focused our investigation.”

Perfectly circular logic. Now that she was talking, though, he decided not to challenge her aggressively. “Were they killed at the dump site?”

“We suspect so. We failed to recover casings.”

“Drag marks? Footprints?”

She shook her head. “Prior to their disappearance there was an unusually heavy snowfall, followed by several days of warming and refreezing. It left poor forensics.”

“Is there any way you could show me the scene? I’d really appreciate it.”

Pelletier chewed her lip. Finally she said, “Let me clear some of the shit off my desk. But you can’t show up here without an appointment and expect me to rewrite my schedule. I’ll call you.”

“Fair enough,” he said, taking out his card and jotting down the name of his hostel. “Thanks.”

She nodded.

“Last question,” he said. “Your contact at the embassy — the house manager? What’s his name?”

She frowned. “You’re not thinking of going there.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“As I said, it’s a delicate diplomatic matter, so I thank you in advance for not interfering.”

He said, “Have you been getting pressure to back off?”

Pelletier’s brow tightened. “Pardon me?”

“No offense meant.”

Pelletier got up. “I have cases. I have men whose cases I oversee. I have a thermostat that does not work. I’ll call you,” she said, unlocking the door, “if I have time.”

She held it ajar. “Don’t be too sorry about having come. Paris is best in the winter. Fewer tourists.”