The Golem of Paris

Chapter four

The night before he began work at the August M. Vollmer Memorial Archive, Jacob went to Wikipedia to learn about its namesake.

Vollmer, it emerged, began as Chief of Police in Berkeley, introducing novel concepts like centralized records and the hiring of minorities. He had formalized criminal justice education and been among the first to equip his men with motorized vehicles. Flush with success, bursting with optimism, he’d come to Los Angeles in 1923 and promptly burned out, quitting after a year and returning to Northern California, where he later committed suicide.

Jacob shut the browser, wondering why anyone would choose to commemorate a guy whose career essentially proved what a shit-show LAPD was.

The next day, standing in a forlorn corner of the hangar, he took stock of his new digs and smiled without a trace of glee. He had his answer.

Rickety laminate desk. Rusty folding chair. Rusty gooseneck lamp. A black rotary telephone capable of inflicting blunt force trauma; a scratched scanner; a balky desktop with no Internet connection.

The archive was a repository for schmucks.

His Project was Special in the same way that certain Needs were Special.

We’ll set you up with everything you need.

Not quite.

Jacob left the building, returning a couple hours later with a space heater, a gallon thermos of coffee, and four handles of Beam.

Adapt or die.

Despite the make-work nature of the assignment, he rapidly developed a taste for the solitude. Mallick didn’t care about hours, as long as Jacob covered ground, and it suited him to show up when he felt like it and leave when he couldn’t take any more.

He pulled down boxes. He put them back, striving to instill some form of order. He read. He coded entries on a prefab spreadsheet.

It was scut, but it did provide an interesting historical snapshot of the high-crime eighties and nineties, detectives barely able to keep pace with the torrent of drive-bys and street slayings, let alone whodunits.

In keeping with Jacob’s experience at Robbery-Homicide, many instances everyone knew who’d done it. The family knew. The cops knew. The bad guy’s name was in the murder book, circled and underlined. He’d threatened the victim in the past. He had a violent record. He had no alibi. But the evidence wasn’t there to convict. Witnesses refused to come forth. They feared reprisal. They mistrusted the police.

And so the dead ends accumulated, the Coroner’s map in the crypt unable to accommodate any more pins in its southern and eastern quadrants; squad room whiteboards filling inexorably with the names of young black and Hispanic males.

One by one, Jacob revisited them.

Omar Serrano, twenty-five, Boyle Heights, shot to death while stopped at a red light.

Bobby Garces Casteneda, nineteen, Highland Park, shot to death beneath the Arroyo Seco Parkway.

Christopher Taylor, twenty-two, Inglewood, shot to death leaving the In-N-Out Burger on Century Boulevard.

They weren’t all male.

Lucy Valdez, fourteen, Echo Park, shot to death, a stray round passing through her kitchen window as she did her geometry homework.

They paraded past, the unsolved and the unsolvable, chanting the name of August Vollmer, Patron Saint of Wasted Effort; clamoring after Jacob Lev, his rightful heir.

Every so often, the desk phone would rattle, a detective ferreting out old links. Once, by sheer luck, Jacob had already cataloged the case, and he was able to hand-deliver the material to an astonished and grateful D. The rest of the time he heard himself trotting out excuses. Dates on boxes didn’t match contents. Gappy murder books. Thirty years’ worth of material; a jumble of nightmares.

The scorn came rolling over the line.

“What sort of bullshit racket you running?”

And while Jacob could point to the number of untouched shelves and tell himself he had miles to go before he slept, he knew they were right. He was drawing a DIII’s salary, doing a clerk’s job.

He’d been kicked way, way upstairs, up into the attic of the past.

Now, padding along in old sneakers, he played the flashlight between boxes marked PROPERTY CRIMES 77 ST 3/11/1990–3/17/1990, VICE HOLLENBECK 07/2006, 1994–5 C.R.A.S.H. The insect’s buzzing had ceased, and he paused in the middle of the aisle, watching his breath billow and dissolve, trying not to touch his lip, which itched like crazy in the cold, dry air.

He gave in and scratched.

From his left came a whisper of legs.

Six feet down the aisle, clinging to a half-opened box labeled HOMICIDE RAMPARTS APR 95: a beetle, its wings creasing and spreading exhaustedly.

Jacob edged sideways, cup poised.

Studded antennae bent — a premonition—

It skittered inside the box.

He hurriedly folded the flap shut and carried the entire box back to his desk, setting it beneath the spotlight of the gooseneck lamp.

Readying the cup, he opened the box and brought the trap down over the stunned bug.

Gotcha.

The beetle went berserk, throwing itself against the plastic pathetically.

“Shhh,” he said. He slid an index card into place and moved the cup to the desk. “Take it easy.”

While the prisoner continued to thrash, he paged through his field guide to insects of the West, eventually finding a match in L. magister, the desert blister beetle.

Native to the Mojave and surrounding areas. Typically they traveled in swarms. How a singleton had made its way into the archive, Jacob couldn’t begin to guess.

Then again, he could ask the same of himself.

Maybe the little hothead had pissed off the beetle brass.

Maybe it was the August M. Vollmer of the chitin-wearing set.

Jacob lowered his chin and tried to make eye contact. “Lost?”

The beetle had simmered down and was glowering at him, drops of venom welling at its joints. Jet-black abdomen, head and thorax deep orange. Not a particularly sexy creature, the elytra pebbly and overlong, as if it was wearing poorly hemmed pants.

He was more interested in what it didn’t look like than what it did.

He was more interested in what it might become.

It didn’t look like her. And it didn’t change. It was an ordinary bug, one of roughly a hundred hundred jillion. Compared to beetles, the sum total of every human being who had ever lived, from Adam to Einstein, was a rounding error.

He reached over and snapped off the lamp.

At four P.M., he saved his work to a flash drive. The weekend lay depressingly open, a problem solved by grabbing a handful of files from the box to take home.

He shouldered his backpack and sandwiched the cup and index card between his palms, causing the beetle to resume its frenzy.

“Chill out,” he said. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

He’d arrived that morning before sunrise, and he stepped from the hangar into a disorienting midwinter twilight that made it seem as if no time had passed.

He hesitated before setting the beetle free, mildly concerned that it might turn on him in anger. That was what a human would do.

Surveying the tapestry of black, the glittering pinpricks, he recalled the taste of Mai’s breath in his mouth as she spoke her good-bye.

Forever.

Promise; request; command.

But he could only swallow infinity in human doses, day by day, keeping his lonely vigil, stalking bugs with a plastic cup and an index card because he had no other way to be close to her.

He pitched the insect into the air. It shot off, all too happy to get away from him.

He had to smile. Beetles were survivors. They were high-strung. They spooked easily. Like all the most successful creatures — and they were successful — they lived strictly in the present, vengeance being memory’s deadliest side effect.

Adapt or die.