The Golem of Hollywood (5 page)

B
adly needing air, he stuffed the Discover card and the sat phone in his pockets and walked the four blocks to the 7-Eleven on Robertson and Airdrome.

Except for a year in Israel, another in Cambridge, and a brief, unsuccessful bid by Stacy to graft him to West Hollywood, Jacob had always lived within the same one-mile radius. Pico-Robertson was the hub of west L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community. His current home was on the second floor of a dingbat, three blocks from the dingbat he'd lived in after college.

He sometimes felt like a dog tugging on its chain. He never did tug that hard, though; breaking free required energy he didn't have.

In a sense, he was ripe for hush-hush undercover work. He lived an undercover life, walking familiar streets wearing a stranger's face. Sometimes a childhood acquaintance would buttonhole him, wanting to catch up. He'd smile and oblige and move on, knowing what they'd be saying about him at lunch on Saturday.

You'll never guess who I ran into.

He's a what?

He married who?

Divorced?

Twice?

Oh.

We should have him over.

We should fix him up.

Steadily his childhood friends had filled their expected positions of prominence. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, people engaged in ambiguous “finance” activities. They married each other. They took out mortgages. They had robust, adorable children.

For this reason, it didn't bother him that he'd devolved into a cliché: the hard-drinking loner cop. It didn't bother him, because it wasn't
his
cliché.

And even if he avoided the community, he felt comforted that it thrived.

Someone had faith, relieving him of the burden.

More important, he had his father to think of. Sam Lev would never leave, and by extension, neither would Jacob.

A reason for staying, and an excuse.

Their corner of the neighborhood had always been low-rent despite proximity to South Beverly Hills and Beverlywood, with their tony mini-mansions. His grade-school classmates engaged in an arms race over the latest Jordans or Reebok Pumps. Jacob got off-brand back-to-school Velcro specials, once a year, Memorial Day weekend. The Levs didn't own a television until the Gulf War, when Sam bought a crappy black-and-white so they could keep count of the Scud missiles pelting Israel. As soon as the hostilities ended, the set went out on the lawn, for sale. Nobody wanted it. Jacob hauled it out with the trash.

The mere fact that he was an only child made him an outlier. Free-spirited, deeply pious, his parents had met and married relatively late in life, raising Jacob in a kind of intellectual and social bubble, without the large extended family that swaddled his peers. The grandparents and  uncles and aunts and cousins who made sure you were never, ever alone.

Jacob was often alone.

Now, pushing through the doors at 7-Eleven, he thought about his TV, disconnected and slumped on the sofa. His father would be thrilled.

The clerk greeted him by name. He did most of his shopping there.

Bachelor's diet.

Bachelor
cop's
diet. He needed to start living better.

He bought two hot dogs and four bottles of Jim Beam.

The clerk, whose name was Henry, shook his head as he scanned the liquor. “I say this as your friend. Go to Costco.”

“Duly noted,” Jacob said. He dug out his wallet, started to give Henry a twenty—then reconsidered and handed him the Discover card.

While he waited for it to ring up, he glanced at the ATM. He had the check in his wallet, too—he hadn't wanted to leave it at home—and he smiled to himself, imagining the machine belching smoke and exploding as he tried to deposit a hundred grand at once.

“It's not going through,” Henry said.

No limit, my ass.
Jacob couldn't pretend to be surprised. It was LAPD. Of course they'd use some company like Discover. He paid in cash, took his dinner, and left.

He made this trip five or more times a week, and his pace was carefully calibrated so that he'd finish the hot dogs right as he reached his building. Two blocks shy, his pocket began to buzz. He crammed the remaining fourth of the second dog in his mouth and fished the sat phone out, hoping for Officer Chris Hammett.

His father.

Jacob tried to quickly chew a too-big bite, coughing as he answered. “Hello?”

“Jacob? Are you all right?”

He swallowed, painfully. “Fine.”

“Is this a bad time?”

Jacob pounded his chest. “. . . no.”

“I can call back.”

“It's fine, Abba. What's up?”

“I wanted to invite you for Shabbos dinner.”

“This week?”

“Can you come?”

“Dunno. I might be busy.”

“Work?”

Jacob assumed that his lack of observance was a disappointment to his father, for whom working on the Sabbath was inconceivable. It was to Sam Lev's credit that he'd never showed outward disapproval. On the contrary, he expressed a shy but morbid fascination with the terrible things Jacob related.

“Yup,” Jacob said.

“It's interesting, I hope?”

“Right now there's nothing much to discuss. I'll let you know as soon as I can.”

“About the case?”

“About dinner,” Jacob said.

“Ah. Please do. I need to know how much food to get.”

“You're not planning on cooking.”

“That wouldn't be very hospitable, would it.”

Jacob smiled.

Sam said, “I'll ask Nigel to pick up takeout.”

Jacob considered that better than having Sam burn his house down, but not by much. His father lived on a tight budget. “I'm asking you to please don't put yourself out.”

“I won't until I know you're coming.”

“Right. Well, I'll call you if I can make it, okay?”

“Okay. Be well, Jacob. I love you.”

Sam was a gentle man but sparing with his affection. To hear him state it plainly took Jacob aback. “You too, Abba.”

“Call me.”

“I will.”

Jacob turned onto his block. The hot dog still felt lodged in his chest,
and he was tempted to crack open one of the clinking bottles and wash it down.

A dinged white work van had taken the place of the Crown Vic.

CURTAINS AND BEYOND—DISCOUNT WINDOW TREATMENTS

Midway up the stairs, Jacob changed course. Rather than take the bottles into the apartment, he stashed them in the Honda's passenger-side footwell and drove back toward the murder house.

H
er older brother says, “You are mine, for I am elder.”

Her twin brother says, “You should love me, for you arrived on my heels.”

Her older sister says, “You are ungrateful and must humble yourself.”

Her twin sister says, “You are willful and must submit.”

Her father says, “You remind me of one I once knew. She flew away.”

Her mother frowns and says nothing at all.

Of herself, she says, “I am mine and I will do as I please.”

—

O
NE
YEAR
HAS
PASSED
since Asham's sisters wed. Now the harvest has come again—a great bounty, thanks to Cain's wooden mule—and their father declares that they will bring their offerings soon.

“And then you must choose.”

“I choose nothing,” Asham says.

Eve sighs.

“It isn't right to be alone,” Adam says. “Every creature finds its mate.”

“‘Its'? Am I an animal?”

Nava, bent over the loom, snorts.

Adam says, “If you won't make a decision, we will allow the Lord to make it for you.”

“I thought you and He weren't on speaking terms,” Asham says.

Yaffa feeds the fire, clucks her tongue. “Don't be rude.”

“Your vanity is a sin,” Adam says.

“You say everything's a sin.”

“Things cannot go on as they have,” Adam says.

“They're grown men,” Asham says. She turns to her sisters. “Tell your
husbands to stop behaving like children.” She picks up the carrying gourd and starts out.

“I'm not done talking to you,” Adam says.

“I'll be back later,” Asham says.

—

W
HENEVER
THEIR
FATHER
SPEAKS
of the garden, his voice droops with sorrow. Knowing nothing of the early days, Asham feels not sadness but wonder that things could be any different than they are. Her greatest pleasure is to walk alone, plucking flowers, grass caressing her bare knees. The land smiles on her. As a girl she would annoy her parents by coming home with her face caked in mud and her hands teeming with bugs and worms and snakes that she has been warned never, ever to touch. They are her companions, the earth's hidden majority, the displaced and the disdained.

Today the valley sings of spring, and she hums in harmony as she tramps through the fields, the gourd swinging by her side, keeping time. She sips air sweet with pollen and savory with solitude.

And why shouldn't she be vain? Not terribly much, but she's not going to pretend she doesn't see how her brothers look at her. And would be lying if she said she didn't find their rivalry flattering, in some perverse way. Though she thinks it would be wicked if that were her only reason for holding out. She knows them. She knows that choosing one will rupture the fragile truce that exists because she has steadfastly refused them both.

What kind of creator creates a world out of balance?

Asham does not share all of Cain's doubts about the Lord's perfection, but neither can she content herself with the simple obedience preached by Abel and their father.

Two by two they exist.

Father and Mother, Cain and Nava, Abel and Yaffa.

And her.

She is the odd number, extraneous, a joke perpetrated by a cruel god.

Runty and irate, she arrived last, moments after Yaffa, in a gush of blood. Their mother speaks of the birth as if she still feels the pain.

In that moment, I understood my punishment.

She does not speak this way of any of her other children, only Asham. Leading Asham to wonder: was the punishment the agony, or her very existence?

—

T
WILIGHT
FINDS
HER
HUGGING
her knees beneath the canopy of a carob tree. Against a sky of purple and gold, soot-colored lumps come over the hill.

Abel, returning with the flock.

Asham watches his regal shape grow. Her twin is fine and fair with fluffy golden hair; he looks, in fact, not dissimilar to the animals he tends. Though she has never heard him raise his voice in anger, there is nothing weak about him. She has seen him carry four stragglers at once, digging his fingers into fleece, lifting while they bleated and protested.

Across the meadow, she can hear him clicking his tongue and stamping his crook, urging the sheep homeward.

The dog sprints ahead to scout.

Asham lets out a low whistle, and the animal pricks up its ears. It bounds through the foliage and into her arms, licking her face. She holds it close and puts her finger to her lips.

“I know you're out there.”

Asham smiles.

“Both of you,” Abel says. “I can hear you.”

“No, you can't,” she calls.

He laughs deeply.

She releases the dog and it bolts forward to lick its master's hand. Asham crawls out and shows herself. “How did you know it was me?”

“I know you,” he says.

“You're out late.”

“I could say the same about you.”

“I didn't want to go home,” she says, hefting the sloshing gourd on her shoulder. It wobbles on a handle made of spun flax—Cain's invention.

“Let me,” Abel says, taking the gourd as easily as if it were empty.

The light has left the trees, and the night stirs, prey and predator alike seeking cover. Fireflies flash and extinguish. The flock tightens of its own accord, and the dog barks at any who stray. Abel listens to Asham relate the discoveries of the day, showing him with her hands the size of the iridescent beetle she caught this morning.

“Don't exaggerate,” he says.

“I'm not,” she says, jostling him.

“You're spilling my water,” he says.

“Sorry—your water?” she says.

“Now my leg's all wet,” he complains.

“Last I checked, I drew it.”

“I'm carrying it.”

“I never asked you to,” she says.

He clucks his tongue at her. It makes her feel like she's one of his sheep.

She says, “Father says we'll bring the offerings next week.”

“It'll be good to give thanks. The Lord has been generous.”

Depending on her mood, his piety either charms or irritates her. At present she wants to hit him again, in earnest; he knows as well as she does that Adam has set her a deadline.

They fall silent. Not for the first time, she wishes Abel would be the one to lead the conversation. Talking to him is like floating in a lake.

Talking to Cain is like thrashing in a whirlpool.

“I'm expecting another lamb any day now,” Abel says.

“Can I help?” she asks.

“If you'd like.”

Asham's sisters are mystified by the satisfaction she takes midwifing
the ewes. Nava, particularly averse to manual labor, makes snide comments.

A man in a woman's body. That's you.

The gory frenzy thrills Asham, though, and until her brothers settle their differences, accepting a lamb into her arms is the closest she'll come to motherhood.

Abel says, “I wish you'd make up your mind.”

“And if I choose him?”

“Then I hope you'll reconsider.”

“Don't be greedy,” she says.

“It isn't greedy to love someone,” Abel says.

“Yes,” she says. “It is. There's nothing greedier.”

—

T
HE
ALTAR
IS
HIGH
atop the Mountain of Consideration, one day's journey from the valley floor.

It is a pilgrimage fraught with disappointment: the closer they draw, the more landmarks they reach, the clearer the memories of previous failures. Cain has often argued that they're wasting good food. They ought to face the fact that they are praying to no one, and that their survival depends solely on their own efforts.

The idea terrifies everyone else, including Nava. Only Asham can see any value in it.

She knows what it is like to rely on herself.

It was in this same spirit that Cain built the wooden mule, in defiance of Adam's warnings. When the crops came up plentiful and fat, Cain hurled the sheaves at his father's feet and crowed.

You are cursed. Not by Heaven, but by your own lack of imagination.

However stern Adam's rebuke, Asham observed that he did not hesitate to eat from Cain's harvest.

The journey began at sunrise; by midday they are trudging along,
weak from having fasted. Abel carries his offering on one shoulder and guides Yaffa with his free hand. Cain and Nava lean on carved walking sticks. The wind whips Asham's hair, and she lags behind, breathless with anxiety. If she feels especially jumpy, it's with good reason. With the brothers still at loggerheads, her father has declared that she will be given to the one whose offering draws favor.

She's not sure how seriously to take this threat. He has made similar pronouncements in the past. But the zeal with which he charges up the hill—Eve following him like a shadow—tells her this time will be different.

Cain falls in next to her.

“Cheer up,” he murmurs. “What's the worst that can happen? Me. Lucky you. Anyhow,” he says, giving her a dig in the ribs, giving her a heretical wink, “I wouldn't worry too much.”

She wishes she shared the confidence of his unbelief.

It seems an accepted truth that Cain is the clever one, Abel the handsome one. To her it's never been quite so clear. That mode of thinking—the assertion that if one person is blessed with one talent, the other must have an equal talent; the idea that equity inevitably prevails—grates hard against her experience. It's true that she finds Abel easy to look at. But she can just as easily look away, knowing that she can always come back to him, and find him unchanged.

There is beauty in imperfection.

Beauty in its evolution.

On the surface, her brothers would seem mismatched to their pursuits. Better Abel to preside over the land, Cain to cope with the bloody realities of livestock. But Asham knows better. For the most part, sheep are self-contained. They reproduce themselves. They emerge fully formed. They allow Abel to ply his benevolence from a comfortable distance.

Farming is different. It is hand-to-hand combat, a constant negotiation with an unwilling partner. It is the slaughter of weeds, the massacre of thorns and thistles. It drafts unruly trees and drills them into
orderly rows, inducing them to produce fruits that are larger and bigger every season. And it is there, on the line between coaxing and coercion, dreaming and plotting, that Cain thrives.

“Here,” he says, handing her his stick. “You look like you could use it.”

He leaves it with her and goes ahead to walk beside Nava, glancing back to wink at Asham again. She thinks he is more handsome than anyone will admit. His scaly green eyes ripple like rising grass. His dark brow holds the force of storm clouds that frighten and sustain them all. For better and for worse, he moves her.

—

E
XHAUSTED
,
THE
FAMILY
HUDDLES
together on their knees. A year's worth of weather has erased the traces of their last offerings, and as Adam raises his hands in supplication, praying that their gifts be accepted with favor, the howling wind drowns him out.

He finishes his prayer, and they rise.

Cain offers first, a bundle of leftover flax. Adam ordered him to bring wheat, but Cain refused, arguing that the crops were his, to be distributed as he pleased.
Grow your own and you can do what you like.

He places the limp, fibrous mass atop the stone altar. Nava pours out a libation of foul-smelling retting water and they reconvene at a distance, watching the heavens for a sign of forgiveness.

The heavens remain expressionless.

Cain smiles sourly. The silence vindicates him, even as it robs him of a wife.

Abel has brought his finest newborn lamb. Three days old and unsteady on its legs, it could not manage the walk, and he has bound it hand and foot. As he carries it to the altar, it raises its head in search of its mother, wailing miserably when it cannot find her.

Yaffa burrows into Asham's shoulder.

Abel sets the lamb down and leans over it, soothing it, stroking its belly.

Cain says, “Get on with it.”

Abel's hand trembles as he raises the slaughtering stone. He glances back at Asham, as if seeking her permission. She looks away and waits for the scream.

It does not come. She looks again. The lamb is squirming. Abel has not moved.

“Son,” Adam says.

Abel shakes his head. “I can't.”

Eve moans softly.

“Then let's go,” Nava says.

“We can't leave the poor thing here,” Yaffa says.

“It cannot come down,” Adam says. “It is consecrated.”

That is precisely the sort of obscure logic that drives Cain mad, and he makes an exasperated noise and strides forth to snatch the stone from Abel's hand.

“Hold it down,” he says.

Abel is wan, useless.

Cain turns to the rest of the family, appraising them one by one before addressing Asham.

“Help me.”

Her heart punches.

He says, “Do you want to be finished here, or not?”

As though compelled by an outside force, she approaches the altar.

The lamb squeals and kicks and she cradles its hot body.

“Keep it still,” Cain says. “I don't want to cut myself.”

She grasps the lamb's feet. It bucks wildly. Terror has doubled its strength and she nearly lets go. Cain grabs it.

“Listen,” he says. His voice is gentle. “It'll be over in a minute. The tighter you hold him, the better it'll go for both of us. For all of us. Tight. Tighter. Good. Good.”

Asham shuts her eyes.

Warmth jets across her arms.