The Golem of Paris

Chapter forty-seven

She opened the door and they stepped into a cloud.

The room was gigantic, hexagonal, tiled on every surface. There was a six-sided swimming pool, surrounded by frothing whirlpools and five arched alcoves, like the side chapels of a church. They were standing where the sixth alcove would have been. All the recesses were dark except the one in the far right corner. Light spilled through a dense curtain of crystal beads, the angle too oblique for Jacob to see inside.

Through a series of hexagonal skylights, a muffled night slunk by.

Jacob heard a low, methodical whickering coming from the lit alcove, like the sound of a blade drawn through paper, again and again.

Just him and Pelletier. The gunman had hung behind in the antechamber.

Can’t see the boss in his birthday suit?

But a cute blonde could?

“Careful not to slip,” Pelletier said.

She went around the pool to the right.

Jacob stepped through puddles, his shoes leaving watery black prints.

The slicing got louder. Crisper. Deliberate. Decisive.

Aromatic steam billowed, wet cedar and wet leaves and other scents of the earth. At strategic points sat pyramids of tightly rolled towels, teak chairs, wicker baskets containing dried birch branches for whipping the skin. Footlights set an ambience that under other circumstances Jacob would’ve described as romantic.

Pelletier stopped a few yards shy of the curtain to announce them. “Pardon, Doktor. Nous sommes là.”

The slicing droned on.

A gentle voice said, “Entrez.”

Pelletier waved Jacob forward.

They parted the curtain.

“Odette.”

Arkady Tremsin wasn’t in his birthday suit. He was wearing a red silk robe and matching velvet slippers, both embroidered with his initials. Never a small man, he’d acquired a paunch, sitting with his legs comfortably splayed, exposing thin ankles suggestive of lost muscularity. His skin was pale. A sharp line halfway up his calves demarcated the start of gray, downy hair. The flesh of his throat was gray and papery and freshly shaven.

“Mr. Lev,” Tremsin said.

He was getting his hair cut.

The alcove was a salon, or a private version of one, counters lined with luxe editions of the normal accoutrements: horn combs soaking in antiseptic, etched jars, an array of polished cutting implements, boar’s-hair brushes. A single chair, plated in that same white metal.

The silk robe, Jacob saw, was actually a silk smock.

A manicure in progress, as well: Tremsin had his hands resting in tubs of foamy water. Nearby stood a wheeled cart set with nail files and emery boards, and on it, a crude black iron ring, removed so he could soak without the flesh swelling up and causing an uncomfortable constriction.

The woman doing the pampering was petite, with strong features and dark hair. She stood on a low footstool in order to snip around the crown of Tremsin’s head. She looked a bit like Lidiya Georgieva.

She made a few finishing cuts, then reached for the blow-dryer.

Tremsin waved to dismiss her, spattering sudsy water.

She exited without a word.

Tremsin put his hand back in the bath. He smiled at Jacob. “Too noisy,” he said.

The hairdresser’s footsteps faded to nothing.

Tremsin said, “What brings you to Paris?”

His moment. Yet Jacob felt stupefied, entranced by the glint of white metal everywhere, as if he was in the belly of a false god.

Hatred roiling in his own belly.

Tremsin studied him; murmured in Russian to Pelletier.

“You don’t look like your father,” Pelletier translated.

Jacob, thrown, said, “My mother.”

“Ah,” Tremsin said. “Better for you.”

His father?

Pelletier nodded to prompt him. “Please, Detective.”

“Marquessa Duvall,” Jacob said. “TJ White.”

Tremsin’s smile arched in confusion. “Pardon?”

“You own a Gerhardt Falke S,” Jacob said. “You bought it in 2004 during the L.A. auto show.”

Tremsin spoke to Pelletier. It was evident from his tone that he was saying something along the lines of what the hell is he talking about?

The anger in Jacob’s gut took a nasty detour toward anxiety.

“That’s where you met Marquessa,” he said. “She was a model. Beautiful girl. Bright future. Did she tell you about her son right then, or did it take some time?”

Silence.

Tremsin was blank. Utterly calm.

He said, “Who are you?”

“What about Lidiya and her son?” Jacob said.

Pelletier said, “Okay, Detective. That’s enough, please.”

“Lidiya and Valko. Did you ever know their names?”

Pelletier said, “Detective—”

Jacob sidestepped her, toward Tremsin. “Let’s talk about Prague.”

Now Tremsin sat up erect, jaw grinding.

“You must be proud of your work,” Jacob said. “At the hospital. You kept your records. I just saw them, in the library.”

Tremsin stood up, flinging a swarm of hair trimmings into the air. “Out.”

“I know what you did,” Jacob said. “I know everything.”

Blood was filling up Tremsin’s cheeks as Pelletier took Jacob firmly by the arm and began wrestling him toward the curtain, hissing, “Move. Now.”

“I know,” Jacob said. “I know.”

Pelletier shoved him backward through the curtain. His sneakers slid around on the wet tiles. He straightened up as Pelletier came out of the alcove to confront him.

“Wait outside,” she said.

Behind her, the beads swung, revealing Tremsin, still on his feet, clenched hands dripping, his chest heaving.

“Wait outside,” Pelletier said, “or I will have you arrested.”

Jacob walked along the length of the pool toward the exit.

He didn’t know what had just happened.

He didn’t know what he ought to feel.

What he did feel was rage. Disappointment at the hideous anticlimax.

What do you expect? He’ll wither in the face of your righteousness?

He could hear Pelletier trying to placate Tremsin, pleading with him in Russian while he screamed at her, their voices echoing off the spa walls like some petty domestic squabble, idiotically magnified.

Jacob reached the rustic wooden door and paused. He had half a mind to turn around and go back.

Priorities rolled around in a jumble.

He needed to find Paul.

Or: Paul was the last guy he wanted to see.

Get out safely.

Go home. That was enough.

It wasn’t enough.

It would have to be enough.

The argument pouring from the alcove broke off, replaced by a swinish sound.

Tremsin groaning, pleasurably.

Pelletier, doing what she could to keep him calm.

Disgusted, Jacob opened the door to leave.

The antechamber was empty.

The gunman gone.

As Jacob lingered on the threshold, puzzled, another series of sounds reverberated down the length of the room: a different sort of groan; an alarmed shriek; a crash.

Silence. Then frenzied movement, the beads of the curtain swinging.

He treaded back along the pool, came into view of the alcove.

He saw the hand baths knocked over, the manicure cart overturned, the iron ring rolled somewhere out of sight.

Tremsin, flat on his back.

Pelletier, straddling him, her hips hammering back and forth.

The motion was a close facsimile of sex. But Tremsin’s smock had fallen aside, his penis semi-erect and visible. Pelletier was fully dressed, using the heel of her hand to vigorously put weight down on his sternum, huffing and struggling and counting.

She was giving Tremsin chest compressions.

Soapy water pooled around them, soaking into her pant legs, his smock.

Jacob stepped through the curtain.

Pelletier looked up and saw him and said, “Go for help.”

He didn’t move.

“He’s having a heart attack,” she said.

The heart attack was over. Jacob could see that. Lines of spittle trailed from the corners of Tremsin’s mouth; his eyes had fallen open, unnaturally wide. She was pounding on a corpse. “For God’s sake,” she yelled.

Why did she need him to get help? She had a phone.

“Stop staring and hurry,” she yelled.

He was staring at her fitness tracker, flung free of her wrist by her frantic pumping. It lay on the tile, six inches behind her left knee.

The green band had come apart and was lying in a C shape. One end appeared normal.

The other terminated in a half-inch-long hypodermic needle, an amber bead quivering at its tip.

Pelletier paused her compressions. Followed his gaze.

Saw the needle and the droplet and said, “Merde.”

Laughing, she let her hands fall by her sides. “Merde...”

She reached over and picked up the bracelet.

Sighed, put it back on, carefully inserting the needle into a corresponding hole. The gap snicked together magnetically, leaving the bracelet unassuming. Standing, she smoothed her slacks. Her blouse was undone to the navel. She began closing it.

“It would’ve come to this, sooner or later. He was always making threats when he couldn’t have his way. You can’t do that forever. People get tired of it.”

She raked her fingers through her hair several times. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s over now.”

Jacob watched the bracelet, wobbling on her wrist.

She said, “I know. Clever, isn’t it? Here’s an irony to reflect on: the formula’s a variation on one he invented, a modified tetrodotoxin. We rode by the formula in the lift. Between the third and fourth floors. His was much slower-acting. Thirty minutes from injection to effect. This one’s far better. Sixty seconds, which happens to be the maximum amount of time I can stand to keep his cock in my mouth. He deserves credit for laying the groundwork, though.”

Jacob said, “Théo Breton had a heart attack.”

Pelletier rolled her eyes. “Please. Don’t be boring. The vial is single-use.”

She walked to the counter. “You can’t blame me for everything.”

She kicked off her heels.

She picked up a bone-handled straight razor.

Opened it.

Lunged.

The extra second she had taken to remove her shoes allowed him to perform myriad primal lizard-brain calculations: the distribution of his body weight on a slippery surface, the radius of danger produced by her outstretched arm plus three inches of honed steel, the probable arc of the blade as it aimed for a clean sever of the jugular vein.

By then he’d moved out of the way.

He backpedaled through the curtain, whipping heavy beaded strands at her.

Harmless, but it did the trick, entangling her as he broke for the exit.

He ran, tipping over tables, kicking over chairs. He couldn’t move quickly on the tiles. But neither could she. She was barefoot. Fingertips, palms, toes, soles — they were all covered in friction skin. It gave better traction. But not much. Man did not evolve in a spa. She might’ve been better off keeping her heels on. She was running on instinct, too.

He heaved a basket of birch branches at her, leaves twisting in the steam.

Reaching the door to the antechamber, he realized the mistake in going through. The room was far smaller than the spa. No space to maneuver, no obstacles between them.

The only escape an elevator that ran at a third normal speed. She’d be on him well before the car arrived. And the armed guard might’ve returned.

He was fucked. He’d been fucked since getting into her Peugeot.

But what choice did he have? He had relinquished all choice the moment he entered the embassy. Before that: when he’d spoken to Vallot. To Breton.

Before all that: he’d been fucked since arriving in Paris; since he started to ask questions about a dead woman and a dead child.

Pelletier could cut his throat and nobody would question her. She was the law.

She’d say that Jacob had attacked Tremsin. She’d tried to stop him. Reaching for the nearest weapon, disabling Jacob, but not before the poor bastard’s heart gave out.

Alas.

How the hell was he going to make it out of the building alive?

One thing at a time his lizard brain said.

In case of fire, do not use the elevator. Take the stairs.

There had to be stairs. Somewhere.

He hadn’t seen any in the antechamber.

In one of the alcoves?

So instead of going through the door, he hooked right, back around the swimming pool, passing alcove one, which housed a vast white marble whirlpool.

No door.

Pelletier came after him, tripping barefoot through the mess of branches, her decision to go shoeless looking more and more imprudent.

Eventually he would run out of furniture to tip and baskets to throw. He’d come full circle and run smack into his own messes.

But for right now he had open floor in front of him and she had junk in her way, and he chucked another basket at her.

She dodged. He was becoming predictable.

He came to the next alcove, a glassed-in sauna. No door.

Alcove three contained a second whirlpool, green onyx. How many fucking bubbles did one person need? No door.

As Jacob continued to run, he realized what distinguished the spa from the rest of the house: no cameras here. It was Tremsin’s private oasis. Too foggy, anyway.

Pelletier knew that. She knew this place. She wanted him here.

The next alcove, the fourth, was the barbershop.

Parting the curtain, he looked past Tremsin’s body, hoping against hope.

No door.

He stopped then, because Pelletier had stopped too, retreating to the antechamber door. Letting him wear himself out.

She said, “Let’s be dignified about this.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

She laughed.

He laughed, too. He felt woozy and flushed.

The only alcove he hadn’t checked was the fifth. Halfway between them.

Forty feet of leaf-strewn tile and fragrant mist and gauzy orange light.

If there was a stairwell, it had to be there.

If he got close enough to find out, she’d be on him in seconds.

Or maybe she wouldn’t bother. Maybe she’d bide her time till the cavalry arrived.

A ray of illumination washed over him. He peered up at the skylight.

Peaceful, abundant clouds.

Was Mai behind them?

Schott was in the building. Molchanov, too.

Waiting for her.

She knew. She wasn’t coming.

Nobody was coming.

Pelletier said, “Tremsin thought you were someone else.”

“Who?”

“We didn’t get that far,” she said. “You made him upset, though.”

“He went to that party, didn’t he?”

She said, “I’m not going to answer that.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You don’t get to learn the truth before you die.”

“What makes you think I’m going to die?” he said.

“What makes you think you’re not?”

He ducked through the curtain into the barbershop, grabbed a razor with a knurled steel handle from the collection, swung it open, grabbed another blade, and reemerged.

Pelletier had closed the gap between them to ten feet.

She halted.

He opened the second razor, held both weapons out like a teppanyaki chef.

“Do you know how to use those?” she said.

Jacob hated knives. In a way they were worse than guns. Even from close range, ninety percent of shots missed. A knife didn’t have to be accurate to do real harm. It could cripple you with a glancing cut.

He said, “I guess we’ll find out.”

He kicked up a fan of leaves and sticks and slurry and rushed her.

She pivoted sideways to narrow her profile, her razor out, glinting, threatening, and he tried to slide off axis to hack at the inside of her elbow, hoping to disarm her right off the bat. But she was nimble and compact and she folded her limbs against her body and corkscrewed down and away from him.

Momentum carried him past her, and the edge of a blade whispered along the back of his leg, opening the denim several inches below his left rear pocket, close enough that he felt thankful for not buying into the skinny jeans fad.

He jerked around to slow himself, crouched, ready to fight her off.

She hung back, her posture relaxed, quick eyes conducting damage assessment.

They’d switched positions, relative to the antechamber door.

Warmth trickled along the back of his knee, over the swell of his calf.

No pain.

Which was either good or a disaster, the wound either so minor as to be irrelevant or so deep that his nervous system had flooded with override signals, enabling him to do the sensible thing: flee.

He didn’t want to look. If he looked, he’d know, and knowing could undo him, mentally. The crucial fact was that he was still standing, his left hamstring strong enough to bear weight.

He went at her again, driving her back over the tiles, swinging the razors in two planes, her belly, her neck. Instinct. Two blades were a bitch to control; he had to slow down to avoid cutting himself, and Pelletier exploited his treadling gait, drawing him away from where he needed to go, which was the alcove behind him, maybe the one with the stairs.

He did the sensible thing.

He stopped attacking her.

Turned and ran.

The next moment swelled monstrously, a blister in the soft tissue of time. He slipped. His injured left leg slewed loose in mud and dead vegetation and his foot lost contact with the ground and he pitched forward, landing on the beak of his elbow, bone on tile, a stunning wave of pain traveling up his humerus and into his shoulder socket. He rolled partway onto his flank, scrabbling with his heels, kicking at the floor, backstroking through debris as Pelletier charged toward him.

He saw her dark brown roots and her neat bared teeth, the diagonal creases of her shirt, her arm spring-loaded across her body, razor held high, front leg planting, torso unwinding to loose the backhand that would spill his innards.

He didn’t have time to shout, to shut his eyes, to throw up his arms.

He listened to his heart’s closing measures.

A wet socket punched through her forehead, just left of center, and her head snapped back and the live pressure dumped out of her body and she flopped down atop him. Her face mashed his chest, then lolled over so that he was staring into her matte eyes.

The exit wound had taken off the back of her skull. In the airspace above them hung microscopic drops of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, clinging to the perfumed mist, a pink filter through which to view the skylights.

The moon had come out.

A tinny pip, as the razor slipped from her hand and fell to the tiles.

Soft bootsteps approached.

A waxy face drifted into view, a human eclipse.

Dmitri Molchanov said, “Nu.”