The Golem of Hollywood (9 page)

O
n the morning of Asham's departure, her father again tries to dissuade her.

“You'll never find them.”

“I won't if I stay,” Asham says.

Eve mumbles to herself.

“Our place is here,” Adam says, gesturing to the valley walls. “You have no right to leave. Seeking knowledge that isn't yours is the source of all evil. There's no worse sin.”

“You think?” Asham says. “I can come up with a few.”

“He's right,” Yaffa says. “Please.”

Asham looks at her ruined sister. Her golden hair has turned to weeds; blue veins worm across her face. She has refused to cast off her widow's garb, refused to work, spending her days cross-legged on the dirt floor, picking listlessly at the skin on her hands.

With Cain fled, and Nava gone with him, the burdens have fallen heavily upon Asham, leaving her to draw the water, cut the firewood, gather the food and cook it; leaving her to grit her teeth while Yaffa keens.

Where is my beloved?

Where is his vengeance?

Asham wants to shake her.

Your beloved is gone.

His vengeance is yours for the taking.

But it requires that you stop crying.

It requires that you stand up, and act.

Asham says, “You don't know what's out there.”

“That's the point,” Adam says. “And if you do find them? How many must I lose?”

“It's justice.”

“Justice is the Lord's to dispense, not yours.”

“Tell that to your dead son,” she says.

He slaps her.

In the silence, Eve's murmuring is like a shout.

Yaffa says, “You don't need to go. I don't want you to hurt him.”

“What hardness is in you,” Adam says, “that you cannot forgive when she can?”

Asham, remembering the scream of an unbodied soul, says, “She wasn't there.”

—

S
HE
CARRIES
LITTLE
. Spare sandals; a blanket of wool and another of flax; a small gourd; a slaughtering stone.

All products of Cain's ingenuity.

She could not pursue him without his help.

Knowing that they cannot be without a source of fresh water, she follows the river upstream, away from the family's sheltered nook in the shadow of the Mountain of Consideration. The next morning she arrives at a sharp bend, the farthest boundary of their cultivation. Past that, their father has said, it is forbidden for man to venture—forbidden to think about venturing.

She remembers a day long ago, standing beside Cain, staring at the opposite bank.

How can a thought be forbidden?

He will have exploited superstition.

In his position, she would do the same.

She wades to the other side.

The valley winds, narrows, widens again. Hacked vines scabbed with dried sap point the way, and she seeks blackened patches—the remnants of campfires, each of which represents a day of their progress. Behind her, smoke threads from the top of the Mountain of Consideration,
which shrinks and drops below the horizon. Vegetation rushes in unchecked. The land's cheery face slackens to indifference and then to a hostile frown. Even the wildflowers appear malignant and overbright. Strange animals stare, unblinking, unafraid. Distant shrieks steal her breath. Skeletons, picked clean, hurry her on.

When Asham was a girl, her parents talked about the hideous fate that awaited anyone who strayed too far. Unimaginable cold, rivers of fire that boiled away flesh, leaving bones for wild beasts to gnaw on. Seizing out of a nightmare, she would feel Yaffa beside her, also trembling, and the two of them would cling together, mewling.

It was Cain who consoled them, Cain with his angry logic.

How would they know what's out there if they've never been?

The Lord told them.

Did you hear him?

No, but—

They're just trying to scare you.

I
am
scared.

Which one is it? Beasts? Or fire? Or cold?

All three.

Fine, then. We'll go one by one. First: anything that can melt your flesh or freeze you solid can do the same to a beast. And heat and cold cancel each other out. So at worst it's one at a time, not all three. And say your bones do get gnawed on. Who cares? You'll already be frozen. Or burned. Either way, you'll be dead, and you won't feel it.

By that point in the argument, Yaffa had her hands clamped over her ears, begging him to stop. Asham was giggling uncontrollably.

And say they are telling the truth
he went on.
They're not. But say they are. You're safe as long as you're here. Isn't that what they said? Right. So. You have nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep and stop kicking me.

That he so long acted as her source of reason makes it all the more difficult for her to understand his crime. Not an hour passes in which she doesn't see his senseless, swollen face.

Now he is the source of her nightmares.

Rage is a fruit that grows larger with every bite. When she is hungry, she eats of it. It is the drummer that never tires. When she wearies, she marches to the pounding of its fists. Each step is consecrated, the long run-up to an altar. She will offer her brother up as an atonement for himself, save him, redeem him. It will be as much an act of mercy as of justice.

—

O
N
THE
TWENTY
-
SIXTH
DAY
, she surpasses the tree line and beholds a new mountain, unfathomably huge, its summit lost in the clouds.

She weeps.

Because she is so tired and yet must ascend.

Because something so beautiful could exist without her ever having known.

The river has been growing steadily, so that its width is now doubled. It roars down the mountainside, carving the stone, hurtling off ledges and exploding into mist. She spends much of the initial stage of her climb soaked, her teeth chattering. Between that and the thinning ground cover, building a fire becomes an ordeal.

From what she can see, Cain and Nava had the same problem.

On the thirtieth day, she kneels before the wreckage of the wooden mule, grieving to see such a marvelous creation reduced to charcoal.

He went about it wisely, of course, breaking the wood up and parceling it out bit by bit, stretching its use to four days, leaving nothing for her to burn.

She wraps herself in blankets and struggles on. The valley's lushness is forgotten here. There are no trees, no soft places to lie, only gravel that causes her to lose her footing, boulders that deflect vicious gusts of wind at unexpected angles, threatening to sweep her off into space.

She could not have imagined how cold it could get.

Perhaps her parents weren't lying, after all.

The hard ground obscures the trail, and increasingly she finds herself confronting an inscrutable expanse of gray stone. She puts herself in Cain's place and asks:
Where would I go?

And when she looks again the correct path seems to glow before her.

And invariably she comes to a black patch beside a stumpy, denuded shrub, the most logical spot to build a fire in this illogical place.

She can do this because he spoke the truth.

She is more like him than she realized.

—

O
N
THE
THIRTY
-
THIRD
DAY
, the ground turns a dazzling white.

Asham bends down to scoop some up; gasps, entranced, as it dissolves.

She has no word to describe its radiance.

She licks her palm.

It's water.

The river, too, has begun to crust over, and later that day it disappears, and she realizes she has come to its place of origin, which Cain talked about as if its existence were a certainty, and which her father dismissed as an impossibility.

She has not eaten in two days. She gobbles white by the mouthful, cold etching down her throat, and walks on.

No matter how hard she sucks in air, her lungs never seem satisfied. Her head spins and she pants silvery clouds as she climbs through the starlit night, afraid to stop and sleep.

Dawn reveals a vivid splash of red against the gray landscape. She cannot understand what it is until she's standing right next to it, and even then she must pry open her mind to admit the reality of the horror.

It is the mule—the living one. Its head and tail are missing. Its hide is flayed and chunks of flesh are carved away from the bone.

Unnatural carnage; the work of man.

Starving, she falls upon the carcass with a stone, slices off half-frozen shreds.

Her first taste of animal flesh is a revelation. The texture and flavor make her feel as though she has bitten off and is chewing her own tongue.

It nauseates her and yet she craves it. It fills her belly and reignites her rage.

A jagged flap of hide dangles from the mule's underbelly. Asham removes it and holds it against herself, warming it to pliability. She hacks it in half and wraps the pieces around her numb feet. Another strip, cut from the neck, she drapes over her own neck and shoulders.

She breaks the mule's ribs and uses them to skewer scraps of flesh.

The animal toiled without complaint to bring their harvest. It is feeding them still.

She spends half a day burying its useless remains.

On the thirty-sixth day, she reaches the pass.

The summit remains cloaked, but she can see down a sheer corridor of blue-white walls to daylight. She staggers along blessedly level ground. From within the walls come pings and cracks and snaps, muffled, and she hurries toward the light, and the sounds grow louder, and she begins to run, but she cannot outrun them, and the air trembles terribly and the mountain bellows its displeasure.

—

S
HE
AWAKENS
in the dark.

Her last memory is of a rushing wall of white, then an all-encompassing cold.

Now she feels parched. She kicks off the blanket and frigid air hits her skin and freezes the tears in her eyes, and she shivers, groping for the blanket regretfully. She thinks if she cannot find it, she will die. She cannot find it. But a hand touches her shoulder and the blanket draws up to her chin and a voice commands her to sleep. She obeys.

—

A
WAKENING
WITH
A
CLEARER
HEAD
, she sees that she is in a cave filled with a pulsing, gelid light. There is no fire. The glow comes from the stones themselves, slick with radiant slime.

A man stands over her, tall as a tree, gaunt as a reed, wearing luminous white garments.

He says, “You are hungry,” and hands her a steaming gourd. Asham raises it and touches it to her lips. Expecting heat, she chokes it out: it's some sort of gruel, water and grain, and it's cold as white. Once she gets a taste, though, hunger storms forth to claim its due, and she cannot stop herself. She drinks the mixture down without pause. It is salty and thick and nourishing. She hits the bottom of the gourd to get out the last drops, licks the sides clean.

The man says, “More?”

She nods, and he pours from a shining vessel. The second bowl she savors. Grateful. And cautious, and confused. She has never seen anyone other than the members of her family. Until this moment, she has been given no indication that anyone else might exist.

He says, “You were burning with fever when I drew you from the snow.”

“Snow?”

The man smiles slightly. “My name is Michael. This is my abode. You may stay here until you've recovered your strength, and then I'll see you down to the valley.”

She pauses, the gourd halfway to her mouth. “I'm not going to the valley.”

The fluctuating light plays over Michael's face, causing his features to shift and fade, so that her eyes cannot catch hold of them. One moment he is young and smooth, the next ancient as stone.

Asham says, “I'm going over the mountain.”

“Your brother is far away,” he says. “It would be wiser to go home.”

“You've seen him.”

Michael nods.

“Where is he? Was Nava with him?”

“You can still turn back. You will be given another.”

“I don't want another.”

Michael says, “It is not the will of the Lord.”

“Maybe not,” she says. “But it's mine.”

—

F
OR
SEVEN
DAYS
he tends to her, and on the eighth day he bids her to rise. He provisions her with water, dried fruit, and nuts; he dresses her in clean flaxen garments and gives her a multicolored fur, soft and strong, light and warm. It comes from no animal she has seen, but she is coming to accept the extent of the world beyond her experience. She knows nothing.

He blesses her in the name of the Lord and says, “Come.”

The cave is far deeper than she realized. Through tunnels, stepping over frozen pools, the temperature rising. A spot of white appears in the distance and Michael stops and turns to her, his ageless face creased with sorrow. She feels as if she is seeing him for the very first time.

“Evil crouches by the door,” he says. “It will wait for you all your life, unless you master it.”

Accustomed to the low light, she emerges blinking into the sun. The air is cool, dry, spicy, rotten. She raises her face gradually, taking in the earth beneath her feet, lightly dusted with snow; the downward slope of the mountain, white giving way to tan, smooth giving way to pebbly; spiky plants rippling with flies; the edge of the sere plain, and then the plain itself, vast, brown, and flat, cracked and smoking beneath a colorless sky, infinite as cruelty itself.

J
acob knew about the Creeper; every L.A. cop did.

Cold for two-plus decades, the case was a favorite of true crime shows for its grisly particulars: nine single women raped, tortured, and slashed.

Every few years, some lazy freelancer dug it up to rehash the lack of progress.

Jacob had been eight or nine at the time of the murders and could remember a paralyzed city. Locks double-checked, no walking to the store, rent-a-cops at drop-off, pickup, recess.

He doubted other kids had noticed.

Exactly the kind of thing he noticed, attuned as he was to an unpredictable world.

Divya Das said, “You look rather more put out than I'd hoped.”

“No,” he said. “No, I—I'm . . . stunned, I guess.”

“As was I.”

“You're absolutely sure it's him?”

“The profile matches every instance where DNA was recovered, seven out of nine. This was offender DNA, mind you, not incidental fluid. Semen from the victims' vaginas and, at one scene, nonvictim blood, presumably the killer injuring himself in the struggle. It didn't hit anyone in the system, though, so in a way I suppose this finding raises as many questions as it answers. Nor does it tell us who killed him, or why.”

“That I can answer,” he said. “Justice.”

Divya Das nodded.

He'd been so caught off guard by the news that it only now struck him how swiftly she'd obtained her results. In his experience, the turnaround time on DNA was seldom less than a couple of weeks. He asked her about it and she shrugged. “Friends in high places.”

“Special friends in special places,” he said.

She smiled. “You said you had something to tell me?”

“. . . yeah.”

He told her about his trip to the house and showed her his photos of the restored countertops. “I was thinking maybe the stuff you used might've caused it to fade, or . . .”

She took the camera, said nothing.

“You swabbed it,” he said.

She nodded.

“And?”

“I examined it for traces of caustic agents. It appears to be an ordinary burn. Anyone could have managed it with a wood-burning pen.”

The same thought he'd had. “Which would leave a mark.”

She pursed her lips at the photo. “Not if it was sanded down.”

“Yeah, but it didn't look that way to me,” he said. “You can—here.”

He took the camera, scrolled back to a photo taken along the plane of the wood. “If there was a dip in the surface you'd see it. But there isn't.”

“Perhaps it was sanded down uniformly,” she said.

He hadn't considered that. There was a reason: it sounded preposterous.

No more so than someone replacing the countertops wholesale, though.

“I guess,” he said. “Any other thoughts?”

A silence.

“None that will help,” she said.

“Maybe I should be looking at contractors,” he said.

She smiled politely.

“One way or the other,” he said, “someone was there. I dusted for prints and didn't find crap. It's definitely possible I missed something.”

“I can go back, if you'd like.”

“Would you, please?”

She nodded.

“Thanks,” he said. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“I can accompany you.”

“That's not necessary,” she said. The smile had dried up; he sensed his cue to leave. It seemed particularly self-defeating, then, the urge he felt to touch her, to tell her that he wanted to see her more, to learn her, to know the woman in the refrigerator photographs. He slapped himself back into line by thinking of the girl from the bar, the boiling whites of her eyes as she lost consciousness.

He said, “If you think of anything else.”

She nodded again. “I'll let you know.”

—

O
N
HIS
WAY
HOME
, he stopped off at Zschyk's, the kosher bakery. He pulled a ticket from the dispenser and waited among the crowd of housewives and their housekeeper proxies. After his conversation with Divya Das, he regretted having accepted his father's dinner invitation. A lost evening. He ought to be running down leads.

He supposed he could drop off the challah and cancel. It didn't seem fair to keep jerking the poor guy around, though.

He could predict his father's response.

Please. Don't give it a second thought.

The worst part was knowing that Sam really was hell-bent on not playing the guilt card. Meaning whatever guilt Jacob felt was self-generated. He hadn't progressed toward adulthood as completely as he liked to think.

The counterwoman called his number, took his order, handed him a
warm bag. By the time he arrived back at his apartment, the Honda had filled with a rich, yeasty aroma, and he decided running down leads could wait.

His vic was a very bad guy who'd gotten away with nine murders.

Now he was dead. Justice. No need to hurry unduly.

He tossed the challah down on his desk and sat to think.

He'd pegged Mr. Head as thirty to forty-five. For the guy to have committed the murders in the late eighties, he would have to fall closer to the high end of the estimate. So he'd been off. He was used to that. The land of Tighten and Tuck devalued first impressions; the best way to figure a person's real age was to look at their hands. Hands didn't lie.

It would help to have some hands.

It would help to have a body.

Whatever his precise age, Mr. Head had gotten off clean for a long time.

Apparently, not everyone agreed that justice delayed is justice denied.

A person who knew the Creeper's secret, judged him for it, did not care to wait around for the system to play catch-up.

Tzedek.

Like much of biblical Hebrew, the word had multiple shades of meaning. The same letters formed the root of the word
tzedakah
, charity.

The mingling of the two concepts struck Jacob as novel, even contradictory. In English, charity and justice stood in opposition. Justice was the letter of the law, the pursuit of absolute truth, the demand for punishment.

Charity mitigated justice, softened it, introduced the variable of mercy.

The murder of a murderer could be considered an act of justice or an act of charity.

Justice for the dead. Justice for their families.

Charity for future victims.

Charity, even, for Mr. Head himself, sparing him from engaging in more evil.

What differentiated between the two Hebrew words was the feminine suffix, the letter
heh
—itself a symbol for the name of God.

Tzedakah
, he supposed, could be considered a womanly form of justice.

That recalled Portia's courtroom speech from the
The Merchant of Venice
. A plea for mercy, delivered by a woman, dressed as a man.

The letters of
tzedek
also gave rise to the word
tzaddik
: a righteous individual, one who performed good deeds, often in secret, without expectation of recognition or reward.

The doer of justice; the doer of charity.

Did that say something about how Mr. Head's slayer saw himself?

Herself?

Why not? Hammett said it was a woman who'd called it in.

Jacob checked his e-mail for a response from 911 dispatch, saw a bunch of spam. He started to write to Mallick, telling him what he had, then scrapped the draft. He didn't really know what he had.

Plugging
Night Creeper
into the
Times
archive brought up seven hundred hits. Jacob narrowed his search to those from the appropriate period, curious to see if any of the vics had overtly Jewish surnames.

Helen Girard, 29.

Cathy Wanzer, 36.

Christa Knox, 32.

Every one of them young, well liked, attractive; every one of them the cornerstone of an exponential tower of ruined lives. Wanzer was blond, a massage therapist who worked out of her home. Girard and Knox, both brunettes, left grieving boyfriends, devastated parents.

Patricia Holt, 24.

Laura Lesser, 31.

Janet Stein, 29.

The parade of happy faces was sapping his motivation to solve his crime.

He circled Lesser and Stein.

Inez Delgado, 39.

Katherine Ann Clayton, 32.

Sherri Levesque, 31.

Convenient for a Jewish vic to equal a Jewish avenger. That was wishful thinking, though. And by themselves, names told him very little. There were Jews with non-Jewish names and non-Jews with Jewish names. There were mixed families. There were friends. There were folks who followed a stranger's case, got interested, and then invested, and then involved far beyond what was reasonable. It happened to cops all the time.

He had to start somewhere, though.

He read about Laura Lesser. A psychiatric nurse. Pretty, like the rest of her unfortunate sorority.

Janet Stein owned a small Westwood bookstore. Memorial held at the funeral chapel of Beth Shalom Cemetery.

Same place his mother was buried.

One definite Jewish victim.

He returned to the archives, found a follow-up article from '98, ten-year-after piece of rubbernecking. A D named Philip Ludwig had picked up the torch, vowing to revisit every lead, utilize every resource, including the FBI's newly operational Combined DNA Index System.

In another follow-up, six years later, he sounded less optimistic.

My hope is that whoever committed these crimes is now dead and can't cause any more tragedy.

The reporter asked if that didn't deny closure to the victims' families.

I don't know what the hell that means.

The article went on to say that Ludwig was headed for retirement at the end of the year. What, the reporter asked, did he intend to do with his free time?

Take up a hobby.

Given the guilt and disappointment seeping through, Jacob was willing to lay even money that, for Ludwig, “hobby” meant sitting around and indicting himself.

Jacob found him living in San Diego—too far to drive and make it back in time for dinner. He called on the sat phone and left a brief message.

He considered starting to track down victims' families, decided to wait until he heard what Ludwig had to say. That left the day open.