The Golem of Paris

Chapter thirty-six

Schott said, “Smooth move back there.”

The two of them sat squashed in the window of a kebab shop, cold pressing through the plate glass, heat from the grill brushing their backs. A portable radio taped to the exhaust hood extruded French rap. Jacob had yet to touch his lamb and Orangina.

“Thanks for the moral support,” he said.

“She probably wouldn’t’ve called anyway.”

Jacob nodded. “What’s your take?”

“Turf war. Her and Breton. Plain and simple.”

“One of them is right, though. It’s linked to Marquessa or it isn’t.”

“She didn’t deny a link.”

“As long as it isn’t Tremsin.”

“He was out of the country,” Schott said.

“According to her.”

“I’ll take her word over Breton’s, who, by the way, struck me as a total crackpot.”

“She sounded pretty touchy herself,” Jacob said.

“Look at it from her perspective. Some stranger shows up out of nowhere, starts poking around, makes the Russians nervous. They complain, crap rolls downhill.”

“Don’t tell me she’s not seeing the similarity. That bit about an opportunist? You want an easy mark, you go for a woman alone, not a woman with a little kid.”

“So?”

“So, let’s give Breton a chance for rebuttal.”

“And if that doesn’t pan out?”

Jacob said, “I’m not leaving till I’ve talked to Tremsin.”

“What is it with you and this guy? You’re acting like he ran over your dog.”

Jacob cut into his lamb. Schott shuddered.

“What?” Jacob said through a mouthful.

“Meat.”

“What about it.”

“The smell.” Another shudder. “It’s like death.”

The chunk in Jacob’s mouth went rubbery and fetid. He managed to swallow, pushed his plate away.

“You asked,” Schott said.

Jacob uncapped his drink. “Whatever this smells like, don’t tell me.”

Schott said, “I never really got the appeal. Take foreign matter and turn it to mush, next day it comes out the other end? Revolting.”

“You should be a judge on Top Chef.”

“Dress it up all you want. It’s just another reminder that you’re an animal.”

“And you don’t like to be reminded.”

Schott shrugged. “I prefer to emphasize my finer attributes.”

“Vanity,” Jacob said. “That’s plenty human.”

Rain had begun to fall, dreary columns that slicked the street with neon.

“I was in my twenties before I found out about myself,” Schott said.

Jacob looked at him. “Come on.”

“I consider myself fortunate,” Schott said. “Most of us never learn. Someone along the line decides to hide the truth, they go about their business, they marry regular folks, the chain gets weaker and weaker. Within a couple generations, they’re lost.”

“So what happened with you?”

“I came to L.A.,” Schott said. “I was working in the industry—”

Jacob burst out laughing.

“Yuk it up. I got my SAG card and everything.”

Jacob conceded that a fellow of Schott’s dimensions filled — overfilled — a particular casting niche. “Anything I’ve seen?” he asked.

“How up are you on your zombie flicks?”

“Not very.”

“Then no, nothing you’ve seen. When we get back, I’ll e-mail you my reel.”

Jacob smiled.

“Whole culture made my skin crawl,” Schott said. “I had a sideline as a limo driver. That’s how I met the Commander. I drove him to a charity function. He recognized me — what I was — right off the bat.”

He paused. “I think I sort of knew all along. I was different, obviously. And I’d have these memories of people I’d never met, places I’d never been. Me, I came down through my mother’s side. When I finally confronted her, she wasn’t the least bit apologetic. She said, ‘I wanted to protect you.’”

Jacob said, “I hear you loud and clear.”

But Schott wasn’t paying attention. “It’s nuts when I think about us, all those years, gathered around the dinner table, my father and brother going to town on their T-bones while my mom and I sit there, forcing ourselves to cut another bite.”

“I thought you couldn’t eat.”

“It’s not a question of can’t. To begin with, I’m half my dad, so there’s that. But the real issue is wanting to feel normal. If you don’t know any better, if people are staring at you, expecting you to eat, you eat. If it makes you feel like you need to barf your guts up every time, you’ve probably got a condition. You eat.”

A stab of self-loathing: Jacob remembered pushing Divya to take a bite of bread.

“It wasn’t an easy transition for me,” Schott said. “From not knowing, to knowing. Actually, I don’t think I could’ve made it, if not for Mel. He practically saved my life. Not practically. Did save it. I was depressed, and he pulled me out of it.”

Jacob said, “You’re lucky to have him as a partner.”

“You bet I am,” Schott said. He paused. “You have a favorite book, Lev?”

“More than one.”

“Mine’s The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov. Read it?”

“I think I might’ve, in college.”

Schott puffed up his chest in a proprietary way. “Uh-uh. If you read it, you’d remember it. It’s that kind of book.”

“There’s a lot I don’t remember about college.”

“Yeah, well, then you should take the time to reread it. It’s capital-G great.”

His enthusiasm made Jacob smile. “What’s it about?”

“Good and evil. Human nature. Faith. Everything, basically. Satan shows up in Moscow and starts wreaking havoc. Bulgakov’s living and writing under Stalin, and he just gets it when it comes to bureaucracy. Like — Satan, he doesn’t come alone. He has a staff. Which is perfect, right? A bad guy’s a bad guy, but the devil? He delegates.”

Jacob laughed.

“There’s one scene,” Schott said, “early in the book. Two guys get a telegram from a friend of theirs, who they just saw, that morning. All of a sudden the guy’s sending them messages from another city, a thousand miles away. The devil picked him up and dropped him there. But of course they don’t know that, and they’re scratching their heads, trying to work it out, resorting to all kinds of backward logic.

“They’re confused, sure. But mostly they’re furious. They’ve crashed into the boundaries of their understanding, and that scares the hell out of them. It offends them. The one guy, he feels it’s ‘necessary, at once, right on the spot, to invent ordinary explanations for extraordinary phenomena.’”

Schott spread his hands on the scuffed tabletop. “It’s a throwaway line, unless you think about it. Necessary. Why’s it necessary? Why can’t they shift their minds in another direction? But that’s Bulgakov’s point. The evidence can be staring you in the face. Most people would still rather come up with a hundred different ways to think around it. Making the leap — it hurts. It drives you nuts. It can kill you, if you’re not careful. That’s how it was for me, anyway. Why I had to lean on Mel so hard.”

“What about him?” Jacob said. “He grew up knowing?”

Schott shook his head. “The Commander recruited him, too. This was back in the nineties, when he first put the unit together.”

Jacob was surprised. “I thought you’d been around longer than that.”

“That’s what I’m saying. For a while, the chain looked like it really was broken.”

“And Mallick?” Jacob asked. “Who told him?”

Schott’s voice thickened with reverence.

“He’s purebred,” he said. “One of the last.”

Jacob regarded the big man with newfound sympathy. He might have been an attack dog, but he was loyal.

And, from a certain standpoint, necessary.

Having tasted Mai’s wrath, Jacob could admit that.

“I know you’re not here to do me favors,” Jacob said. “But as long as we’re working together, I’d like us to come to a temporary agreement.”

He’d meant it honestly; he’d glimpsed a heart beating beneath the layers of armor, and his instinct was to respond in kind.

Later he would wonder if his phrasing had somehow landed awry, or his tone.

Regardless, the effect was clear enough.

The screen came slamming down.

“You already made the agreement,” Schott said. “I’m ensuring you hold up your end.”

A commercial came on the radio. The counter guy fiddled with the dial, selecting limp eurodance that kicked the mood apart, leaving them once again at a smeary table, acting out their indifference for an indifferent audience of foam cups and clawed glass.

“Say you do catch her,” Jacob said. “Did you bring the knife?”

Schott drummed his thighs.

“You’re going to kill someone with my knife, I have a right to know,” Jacob said.

“First off, it’s not your knife.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Nobody’s getting killed.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Cause she’s not alive.”

“She sure looked alive to me.”

“She does a fine impression,” Schott said. “But it ain’t real.”

“Yeah, well,” Jacob said. “I could say the same about you.”

He picked up his kebab. “How’d you get it past the metal detector at the station, anyway? Is it up your ass or some other place I can’t hope to understand?”

Schott said, “Finish up and let’s get out of here.”

Drawing his plate near, Jacob took a bite, chewed slowly. Theatrically.

“It may be foreign matter,” he said, “but it’s freaking delicious.”

Schott made a disgusted noise, shoved his chair back. “I’ll wait outside.”