He came to the last page. Nine-fifteen p.m. Lunchtime in L.A.
He reached for the remote control.
No remote.
No TV.
Twenty bucks a night, you get what you pay for.
For the next hour, he read the obsolete guidebook from cover to cover.
Learned what to say if he was detained by customs.
Learned how to avoid having his film confiscated.
Wide awake, he shut off the light and stretched out, free-associating through the Castle Court chronology.
Eleven p.m., the call first comes in.
Hello.
Who greeted 911? People calling 911 forgot their own names. They stammered. They repeated themselves.
I’d like to report a death.
Not a head or a dead body or oh my God please help.
A death.
As though the victim had departed the earth peacefully, doing what he loved best. In the bathtub. On the golf course.
The woman’s tone was grotesquely at odds with the content of her words.
She’d like to report it.
She enjoyed reporting it.
It would be my pleasure to report a death.
Ms. Mai with an i Whoknowswhat, of Whoknowswhere, kindly requests your presence at the discovery of a corpse. Dinner and dancing to follow. RSVP to LAPD. Black tie suggested.
Giving the address, she enunciates, so as not to be misheard. It’s the dispatcher who’s tripping over her own words.
Thank you.
Again: who does that?
Per Divya, the murder hadn’t taken place long before the call. Hours, not days. But no body, no blood, no spatter. Off-site.
Where?
I’m just a nice young lady who came down for some fun.
Down from?
Up. That’s where you come down from.
An especially nasty in-joke? A reference to the fact that the house was in the hills?
An hour passes between the call and Hammett’s arrival.
During that time, what does Mai do?
Hunker down, waiting to see if they take her seriously?
Does she watch the patrolman go inside? Snap pictures with her cell phone?
Post them to Facebook? Tweet?
w/cops @ murder scene
#justice
lol!!
Or has she already split? She might have phoned it in from another location. The lack of background noise on the recording made it difficult to tell.
Meanwhile, Hammett radios in. The information gets punted around.
Not for very long, though. Divya Das arrives at the house around ten to two. She lives over an hour away, and that’s assuming she goes straight to the right address, without getting lost. Meaning she’s called out no later than twelve-forty-ish. Meaning the news hits Mallick’s radar in under an hour.
Making for a level of efficiency Jacob had never encountered at LAPD.
Unless they’re already on the move.
Meaning, they know about the head before the call comes in.
Nonsense.
Unless they’re with Mai at the scene.
Maybe they cut the guy’s head off.
Maybe Divya’s there, too.
Maybe they all are.
A grand conspiracy! The whole goddamned department!
He indulged himself, wallowing in paranoia. LAPD death cabal, put that Jew Lev on the case, then obstruct him. The bizarro work-at-home arrangement, the fritzy computer system. The unresponsiveness when he requested the recording, Mallick’s attitude when he finally played it for Jacob.
Did that help?
The Commander expected him to recognize her voice? Meaning, Mallick knows Jacob met Mai?
But Mallick can’t know that.
Go. I think you’ll find it educational.
Go fuck yourself, Confucius.
Neither O’Connor nor Ludwig had mentioned anybody named Mai with an i. Not that that meant a thing. Her real name could be Sue or Helena or Jezebel.
Whoever she is, at some point after making the call, she heads over to 187.
For some fun.
Fun with Mr. Sunshine, so drunk he can’t even remember the color of her hair. His inability to perform self-evident. What’s she doing, talking to him?
Why drive him home?
Why spend the night and get him stoked for sex, only to disappear?
Minutes later, Subach and Schott show up.
The timing made his stomach ache.
He played the recording through several more times, pressing the speaker up to his ear. It sounded like Mai — his memory of Mai. But what, really, was that memory grounded in? Ten hungover minutes. The wilder his thoughts wanted to be, the tighter he leashed them, and eventually he was able to listen to the recording and decide that it wasn’t her, after all. He’d been dreaming about her and thinking about her, far more than he ought to, and that was making him hear her specific voice when in fact it was a generic female voice, a voice that could belong to any woman. He listened again, noting the sound’s diminished quality, considering the route it had taken to get to him, the signal filtering through a phone and a satellite and a computer, emerging through a tiny crappy built-in speaker. He should get some high-quality headphones. He listened again and concluded that he’d been wrong, dead wrong. The voice wasn’t Mai’s. And his earlier conviction that it was her voice now discomfited him profoundly, as it implied his critical apparatus wasn’t functioning too well.
Restless, he turned on the bedside light and leaned over to root through his bag.
The crude cover art: the golem, forever pursuing someone beyond the edge.
Read him a normal book, like a normal child.
A book of ghoulish tales probably wasn’t the right choice to induce sleep. But he had a vague recollection of the golem as a benevolent being, fearsome appearance notwithstanding, and right now, a take-care-of-business pile of super-sludge vanquishing evil sounded terrific.
He opened up and started to read.
The Jews of Prague, unlike their brethren in other kingdoms, oftimes dwelt in harmony with their gentile neighbors.
However, it did so happen that there once was a gentile man, a tanner of leather, who employed a certain Jewish maid, an orphan, a girl of great beauty, and also very pious and chaste, which qualities the tanner did not fail to notice. Day by day he observed her kindness and modesty, and soon he came to love the maid, and to desire her for his wife.
But when he professed this wish to her, the maid refused, citing the laws of her fathers, and although the tanner continued to petition her with amorous declarations, she continued to spurn him, her obstinacy serving to inflame his wrath, until at last there came a day when, catching her unawares, he sought to take her by force.
Valiantly the maid fought to free herself by any means necessary, and this she did, seizing upon a pair of heavy iron shears, made to cut animal hide, and blinding the tanner in one eye, so that he cried out and released her, and she fled.