The Golem of Paris

Chapter forty-one

He led them down the street to a bar-tabac whose interior smelled of radiator steam and shoe leather. Off-duty medical staff warmed hands over coffees.

They took a booth and the blond man introduced himself as Dédé Vallot.

In broken English, he explained that he worked for Théo Breton — or had, until the higher-ups forced Breton out. Ever since then, he’d been passing along progress reports, monitoring Odette Pelletier, logging her calls.

Jacob said, “You were the one who gave Breton my number.”

Vallot nodded, accepting his beer from the waiter. It was not yet ten a.m.

“Why did he ask you to keep tabs on Pelletier?” Schott asked.

“She’s come from the sky, eh? We thought, who she is, l’IGPN?”

“What is that?” Jacob asked.

“La police des polices.”

“Internal affairs,” Schott said.

“Ouais. So I make a check. Pas l’IGPN. Pas la Crim. Les RG.”

Schott sought clarification before translating: “Intelligence.”

“How’d you find this out?” Jacob asked.

“My friend,” Vallot said.

“And he’s reliable.”

“The most.”

“What’s an intelligence officer doing on a murder squad?” Schott asked.

“Her file is... Eh. Expurgé.” Vallot made striking-out motions. “But he told me her university, in Lyon. So I make another check. Et voilà: two years, she was study literature in Moscow.”

“You’re shitting me,” Jacob said.

“No shitting.”

“Is there a connection to Tremsin?”

“Impossible to say. But...” A shrug.

“She told us Tremsin was out of the country the week of the murders,” Schott said.

“The plane,” Vallot said. “It’s belong to him.”

Of course it did. “Private jet,” Jacob said.

“It goes to Cyprus. Okay. But who is on it?”

“He could have been in Paris after all.”

“What about customs records?” Schott said. “A manifest.”

“Tremsin pays to the airport. He pays to the pilots. No one cares.”

“Pelletier didn’t want to follow up?” Jacob asked.

“She sayed it’s not important.”

“It sounds pretty important to me.”

“Ouais. Too important.”

Jacob sat back. “Did you take this to anyone?”

“Who?”

“Your boss.”

“He’s listen to Odette. She is above me.”

Jacob said, “Have a look at these.”

Vallot shuffled through the stack of L.A. crime scene photos, lips curling in revulsion. “Putain.” He drained his beer, waved on a second.

“You saw the same thing,” Jacob said.

Vallot moved the salt shaker to one side of the table. “The mother.”

He placed the pepper opposite. “The son.”

Jacob said, “I looked for crimes with a similar setup. Other than yours, I couldn’t find anything.”

“Us not nothing, either.”

“There’s a ten-year gap. I’m having a hard time believing a guy this fucked up goes on vacation that entire time.”

“Théo wants to look in Russia.”

“Did he get anywhere?”

“He was lost his job.”

“And Pelletier took over.”

“Yes.”

Jacob said, “I’d like to see the scene. You think you can show me around?”

Vallot hesitated. “It’s a bad day.”

“I know. I’m sorry about Breton. I take it you two were close.”

Vallot nodded. Then he said, “She was in the hospital. Odette. She never visit Théo before. But last night, she’s going.”

He swirled his glass, looked up at them. “Why?”

“Someone called and told her the news, I assume.”

“Who’s calling? She’s not friends.”

Vallot drank a third of his beer, wiped his mouth.

“I sawed him yesterday,” he said. “He was look better. Then... Pof. The doctor sayed he’s having a heart attack. I want to know, how? Théo has cancer. His heart, there is no problem.”

Schott said, “What’re you getting at?”

Vallot tugged listlessly at loose neck skin.

Schott said, “You don’t actually think she could’ve done something to him.”

“I sawed him yesterday. He was look better.”

Jacob said, “He seemed like a fine guy.”

Vallot threw back his beer. “I message you. Today, later, maybe.”

He started to uncrumple a twenty-euro bill.

Jacob said, “Let me get it.”

Vallot didn’t argue, but put his money away.

“I appreciate the help,” Jacob said. “One other thing.” He showed Vallot the phone image of the man who had tailed him through the Marais.

Vallot shook his head.

Jacob said, “He’s one of Tremsin’s bodyguards.”

Vallot accepted the information with mute resignation and left.

When he’d disappeared from view, Jacob turned to Schott. “The hell are you giving him a hard time for?”

“He resents Pelletier because she upstaged his buddy. So now she’s snuffing a fellow cop with end-stage cancer? The guy’s talking shit.”

“The guy,” Jacob said, “is grieving.”

“Emotions fuck you up,” Schott said.

Jacob shook his head, raising a finger to a passing waiter. “Une bière.”

Schott made a face.

“What?” Jacob said. “You want one, too? Deux.”

“Oui, monsieur.”

Porte Dauphine stood at the center of a honking roundabout, encircled by an archipelago of brown lawns and concrete. Outside the Métro entrance, Jacob twisted his hands in his pockets, trying not to let on to Schott how antsy he felt. Vallot had texted the location and a meet time of one-thirty, and it was nearing two.

“Maybe he got drunk,” Schott said. “Lost track of time.”

At five after, Vallot came up from the subway, apologizing for his tardiness.

They entered the park via the Route des Suresnes. The transition from urban to wooded was rapid but incomplete: half a mile in, they were still seeing parked cars, dog walkers, the occasional hard-core jogger in tights. Ranks of trees fanned across lawns peeled to dirt and dotted with frost. Rowboats stacked up for the season crowded the banks of Lac Inférieur. A woman at the mercy of a Saint Bernard hurtled by, and Vallot left the pavement, trotting along a gravel path, away from the lake.

Jacob checked the time. Five-twenty a.m. in Los Angeles. Still no response to his e-mails. He put his phone away and said, “When’s the funeral?”

“A week, two.”

“He has a family?”

Vallot clucked his tongue. “Girlfriend. Ex. She’s arrange.”

They crossed a wooden bridge over a slushy stream, which Jacob identified on his map as the Ruisseau de Longchamp. From there he lost track, as Vallot turned down one footpath, then another, the trail steadily degrading until they were tramping in slop. A layer of mist seethed through the tree trunks, damp quiet broken irregularly by chittering or panicked movement in the underbrush.

Vallot paused in front of a gnarled stump sealed with tar. He shifted his backpack to the other shoulder and stepped off the path, motioning for them to follow.

They slogged over dense terrain, the silence folding over itself. They had stopped speaking, Vallot gesturing to indicate a crashed log, a knurl of rock hidden beneath vegetation. Only twigs, exploding like buckshot; Schott’s chesty panting; the mournful suck of mud, ankle-deep, piling up along the sides of Jacob’s shoes, soaking into his socks, numbing the skin up to midcalf. His hands had gone numb.

Nothing to see now, except mud and trees.

Fifty paces off the trail and the woods had closed in like a coffin, thatching off sightlines, blunting perspective. The other men were feet away, but Jacob felt the choking solitude that Lidiya and Valko must have felt, even side by side, the devastating awareness that despite laws and totems and covenants, you were always, finally, alone.

The place, when they arrived, was self-evident: an oblong patch of earth, a roof of iron sky.

The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder.

Schott said, “I’m amazed they were discovered as quickly as they were.”

“The guy who’s find, he was hunt for mushrooms. It’s for him a big secret place.” Vallot paused. “I don’t think he’s come no more.”

He tugged open his backpack and handed Jacob a corresponding bundle of crime scene photos. “For you. Odette was in the office. I waiting for her to leave, so I’m late.”

“Thanks.”

Vallot rubbed his hands on his corduroys, chinned at the top photo, which showed Lidiya’s body at one o’clock, Valko’s at seven, a grotesque nativity. “You can see, this the same tree. It has this, eh, a face, yes?”

Jacob saw what he meant: a rough leer in the bark.

He stepped into the clearing, mentally overlaying past atop present, feeling waves pass through his chest, horror continuing to reverberate. Left undisturbed, the mushrooms had run riot: evil-looking things, phallic caps grayish yellow and thick with slime, penetrating up through the humus. In the photographs, ice covered the ground.

“She said you had a lot of snow before the discovery of the bodies.”

“It was the most cold winter for a long time. This winter, it’s much better.”

“Feels pretty cold to me,” Schott said.

“It’s the reason I should go to California,” Vallot said.

Jacob knelt before the spot where Lidiya had been left, holding up her photo.

“What’s she wearing?”

“It uniform for the embassy. Théo thought maybe the guy’s like her for this.”

“A fetish.”

“Ouais.”

“There was no sexual assault, though.”

“Maybe someone’s coming, he gets scared to run away.”

Jacob didn’t think so. The scene in the stills didn’t look interrupted; if anything, it was more symmetrical and orderly than the one in the Hollywood alley. Certainly Lidiya was better balanced than Marquessa had been. Maybe the killer remembered the problems presented by a disobedient corpse.

Ten years to perfect his craft.

He crossed to Valko’s tree. In the photos, the boy had the same submissive expression as TJ White. The same care had been taken to fold his hands.

The physical similarities ended there. Where TJ was round and innocent, Valko had begun to develop the contours of manhood, hard ridges risen below gaping eye sockets. Life had grown him up, fast.

“What’s the number on his chest?”

Vallot had a look. “Hugo Lloris. He’s a very big football player.”

“It was dead of winter,” Jacob said. “Where’s his jacket?” He cycled back to the picture of Lidiya. “Where’s hers?”

Schott said, “Maybe the killer took souvenirs.”

Jacob turned to ask Vallot where the embassy was, what was the most direct route. His eye caught on a clump of mushrooms.

“What,” Schott said. “What is it?”

Jacob found a twig, poked it between the stalks to extract an object far the worse for wear, its red paint mostly gone, a corroded chain dangling.

A key fob.

The insignia stamped into its center had fared better. It was cast in relief and gold plated.

A tiny image of the Gerhardt Falke S.