Three plastic bins sat on a table.
“Check them out,” he said to Halliburton. “Get what you want from here and back in the other room. We’re leaving.”
“We’re stealing them?”
“No, Tre. I’ll give them a credit card for collateral. Of course we’re stealing them. Now get what you want.”
Halliburton hustled into the room.
He dragged the curator back to the front.
“You’re lucky,” he said, “that you’re a good liar since, one, those police believed you and, two, me shooting you would draw far too much attention.”
“And three, señor.”
Had he heard right? This fool was challenging him?
“You do not want to kill me in front of your amigo.”
He resented the smug way the astute observation was delivered.
“Actually, my third reason would have been different. I want you to tell the Simon that he and I are going to have a serious conversation. Soon.”
Then he swiped the butt of the gun across the man’s head, sending him into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“1580 WAS THE YEAR. YES. THAT WAS IT, EXACTLY,” SAKI SAID.
Tom listened. For a ten-year-old, there was nothing better than a good story and he loved the ones his grandfather told.
“It happened in Prague,” the old man said. “Rabbi Loew was chief rabbi of the Jewish quarter. That meant he was in charge. Above his door, engraved in stone, was a lion with a grape to indicate his direct descent from King David himself.”
“M. F.,” his grandmother called out. “Don’t fill the boy’s head with tales.”
Saki’s name was Marc Eden Cross. Tom’s great-grandmother’s maiden name had been Eden, the label added to her only son’s out of respect.
“Tommy here loves my stories,” his grandfather said. “Don’t you, boy?”
He nodded.
“He likes me to tell him about the world.”
The old man was approaching eighty and Tom wondered how much longer he’d be around. Lately the concept of death had become all too real with the passing of two aunts.
“It all happened in Prague,” Saki said again. “Another fanatical priest had decided that we Jews were a threat. Christians feared us since kings relied on us. So, to increase their power, they had to destroy us. They used to say we killed Christian children and used their blood as part of our worship. Can you imagine such lies? Blood libel is what we call that now. But the lie worked. Every few years Christians would form mobs and slaughter Jews. Pogroms, that’s what they’re called, Tommy. Never forget that word. Pogroms. The Nazis instituted the greatest one of all.”
He told himself to never forget the word.
“Rabbi Loew knew he had to protect his people from danger and he found out how to do that in a dream. Ata bra golem dewuk hachomer w’tigzar zedim chewel torfe jisrael.”
He knew some Hebrew and caught a few of the words.
“ ‘You shall create a golem from clay, that the malicious anti-Semitic mob be destroyed.’ That’s what he dreamed. And that’s what he did. He created a living body from clay using fire, water, air, and earth. The first three made the last one come alive.”
Could that be true? How incredible.
“He made his creature real by inserting the shem. A small bit of parchment, upon which he’d written God’s name, into the mouth. Then he said, ‘Lord made a man from the clay of the Earth and breathed the breath of life into his mouth.’ The golem rose to his feet. Rabbi Loew told the golem that his mission was to protect the Jews from persecution. His name would be Josef and he must obey the rabbi’s commands no matter what may be asked.”
Tom listened as his grandfather explained how Rabbi Loew would give the golem a plan every Friday and Josef would follow it for the next week, protecting the Jews. One Friday he forgot to provide direction and the golem, with nothing to do, went on a rampage, wanting to demolish anything and everything. People were terrified until Rabbi Loew ordered him to stop. From that day on, he never forgot to provide weekly instruction. By 1593 threats to the Jews had lessened. Rabbi Loew decided it was time to send Josef from this world.
“He told the golem to spend the night in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. After midnight, the rabbi and two others climbed up and proceeded to do backward everything that had been done to create the creature. If they were at his feet then, they were at his head now. All the words were recited in reverse. When done, the golem was again a mass of clay, which was left there. From that day on it was forbidden for anyone to go into the loft of the Old-New Synagogue.”
Tom sat on the sofa in Inna’s apartment and thought about Saki. He’d loved that gentle soul. When he’d read Abiram’s note and caught the reference to the golem, he’d immediately recalled that day long ago when he’d first heard the story.
And that’s all it was.
A story.
As an adult, he’d written a puff piece for the LA Times about Prague and the legend. Golems were not a Czech concoction. They were first mentioned in ancient Egypt. Kabbalist texts spoke of them. The Bible even used the word. They were never associated with Prague until the 19th century. And nothing in any historical record connected the great Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who lived in the 16th century, known as Rabbi Loew, with any golem. The story was first told in an obscure travel guide, reprinted in a popular book from 1858 on Jewish legends called Sippurim. After that, the golem became a part of Czech lore. Novels and more books followed that incorporated the story, each incantation making the tale even more fantastic.
“This book is one of my favorites,” Saki said to him. “It’s a novel published in 1915. I was a boy when I was given this copy. I’ve kept it ever since.”
He stared at the thin volume, printed in another language.
“Czech,” Saki told him. “It’s called The Golem and was written by a man named Gustav Meyrink. A huge bestseller for its time. It’s about magical Prague. Mystical things.”
“You can read this?”
“My mother was from there. She taught me Czech as a child.”
While writing the piece he’d made a point to learn more about Meyrink’s novel, which stoked the legend and eventually caused people from all over the world to visit Prague. The Iron Curtain halted those pilgrimages for decades, but the Velvet Revolution again allowed them. His story for the Times reported on how hundreds of thousands of Jews came each year in search.
The golem helps protect our secret in a place long sacred to Jews.
That’s what Abiram had written. His grandfather, Abiram’s father-in-law, had apparently used a fiction to shield a fact.
He held the key from the grave, with its strange markings.
What did it open?
Alle was asleep in one of the bedrooms. Inna’s children had doubled up in the other. He and his daughter spoke little after Alle returned. She’d stayed quiet, calm, her customary anger suppressed. Which made him even more suspicious. Right now he was at least two steps ahead of Zachariah Simon, and he planned to stay that way.