The Golem and the Jinni (62 page)

In his darkened dormitory, Yehudah Schaalman readied himself for another night of hunting. He dressed quietly, padded down the creaking staircase, and crept out the front door.

He’d thought to go north again, back to the park where the dowsing spell had last led him. It seemed less than promising, but what else could he do? He had so little to go on, with these trails appearing and fading at random, like the marks of a restless spirit . . .

The realization exploded through him, and he nearly stopped in his tracks. His quarry, the thing he was looking for:
it was a person
. The Bowery rooftops, the parks—someone was wandering the city, and Schaalman was following him like a bloodhound. It explained why the trails left off the way they did: having reached his destination, the wanderer would then retrace his steps to his home. Which meant that all Schaalman had to do was find a path and follow it back to its source, and there his quarry would be waiting.

He had no sooner reached this conclusion when, as if by reward, a path appeared beneath his feet. He halted, amazed. He was at the corner of Hester and Chrystie, still in the Jewish neighborhood. He’d walked these streets dozens of times—yet now the street corner glowed in his mind, every concrete inch a fascination. His wandering quarry had passed this way so recently it might have been that very day.

He could have danced in the street, but he forced himself to remain calm. He turned in a slow circle. There: the building on the southwest corner, that was the one he wanted. The front stoop was lit with interest—and so, strangely, was the ill-tended flowerpot next to the door. But there the trail ended. The door itself was merely ordinary. So: his quarry had climbed these steps, perhaps for a conversation, or to see if someone was at home, and then set off again. But where?

He wandered down the stoop again, letting his feet direct him. Halfway up the block was another building, shabbier than the first—and at this one, the trail did not stop at the door. Cautiously he entered the lobby, his shoes slipping on filthy tile. The trail drew him up a dark and treacherous staircase that led to a cabbage-smelling hallway, and at last to a particular door. He pressed his ear to the wood, but heard no voices, only what might have been breathing.

As he stood debating whether to knock, someone emerged from the water closet in the stairwell. He retreated down the hallway and watched as a pregnant woman in a white nightgown navigated sleepily toward the very door that had grabbed his interest. The aura that surrounded her was so strong it drew his gaze like a compass-hand. “Excuse me,” he said.

He’d spoken quietly, but she jumped nonetheless. “Good God,” she panted, one hand to her swollen belly.

“I wonder if you can help me, I’m looking for a friend.” He paused to think, plucked a name from the dark. “Chava Levy?”

The woman seemed to shrink from the name. “I haven’t seen her in months,” she said, fear and suspicion weighing her voice. “Why are you looking here?”

“I was told she might have come this way. By a mutual friend.”

“Ahmad? Did
he
send you?”

He took the lead she’d offered. “Yes, Ahmad sent me.”

She scowled. “You might have said so. Tell him he won’t get his money any more quickly by hounding me. And
you
, old man, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Frightening a pregnant woman in the dark!”

Her harangue was growing louder. Soon someone would hear, and investigate. The time for subtlety was over. He gripped her wrist, as he had with each of the rabbis. For a moment she tried to pull away; then she went still.

He asked,
Who is Ahmad
?

And before she could open her mouth to reply, a vision shot through his mind: a searing light, an immense singular flame, burning with the strength of an inferno.

He dropped her wrist and stumbled back, trying to rub the light from his eyes. When he could see again, she was watching him with wary suspicion, oblivious to what had happened. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He pushed past her to the staircase, and fled in the darkness.

On the street again, he paused, breathing deeply in the damp air. What
was
that, in her mind? A flame that burned like the fires of Gehenna, a flame that was somehow alive—but she had called it Ahmad, talked about it as though it were a man! How did this make sense? Was there another force at work here, something beyond his own considerable understanding?

Ahmad
. He wasn’t even sure what sort of name it was.

At the Spotted Dog, the nighttime crowd was turning raucous and unruly. Already three patrons had been tossed out for fighting. But Michael, at his table in the corner, was roundly ignored. He wondered what he looked like to the regulars, the muscled factory workers and dockmen. A cowardly, henpecked bureaucrat, afraid to face the long walk home? Not far from the truth, he supposed.

He sifted through his uncle’s notes again, his eyes skittering over the formulae and diagrams. He had sent the message to his wife at seven-thirty; it was now passing eleven o’clock. He’d dispensed with the tumbler and was now drinking the dubious whiskey directly from the bottle. Reason still insisted that the notes were full of delusions, the products of old age and superstition—but the battlements of his reason were crumbling.

He took one last pull from the bottle, then picked up the papers, stumbled out to the alley, and vomited. It made him feel no better. He wove through the alley and back to the Sheltering House. All was dark and quiet; he’d missed lights-out. In his office, he opened an overflowing desk drawer and stuffed his uncle’s notes inside.
To Bind a Golem to a New Master
, screamed the one on top. He grimaced and slammed the drawer shut.

The room was spinning. He had nowhere else to go, no destinations in his life besides the Sheltering House and his now dubious home. And what about friends? He’d neglected them all, drifted away in a fog of work and exhaustion. There was no one left on whom he could impose, for conversation or a couch to sleep on. He needed someone willing to listen without judging, who could observe with a clear and sympathetic eye.

Joseph. He could talk to Joseph, couldn’t he? The man was as close to a friend as he had these days. Even through the alcohol, Michael knew that to wake an employee for a heartfelt outpouring in the middle of the night was beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. Still, he forged up the stairs to Joseph’s dormitory.

Joseph’s cot was empty.

He stood in the restless dark, feeling obscurely betrayed. What business could Joseph have elsewhere at this hour? He sat down on the cot. Perhaps Joseph had gone for a walk to escape the dormitory heat. Nevertheless, a prickle of suspicion gathered like an itch. He thought of his wife asking after Joseph, and the measly bits of information he’d been able to tell her. Why had she been so interested in him?

He had never before invaded the privacy of any of his guests. There were men all around him who might wake and watch. But now, with one eye on the hallway door, he rummaged beneath Joseph’s cot. His hand encountered the handle of an old-fashioned carpetbag. He drew it from beneath the bed, wincing as it scraped the floor. It smelled old and musty, as though it had been stored beneath innumerable cots for generations. The latch creaked open at his touch. Inside were a few articles of clothing, neatly folded, and an old prayer book. That was all. No photos of relatives, no mementos or trinkets of home. Was this all Joseph owned in the world? Even for the Sheltering House, this was a meager collection. Michael might have felt a surge of pity, except that Joseph’s strange absence made the lack of belongings seem sinister—as though the man didn’t truly exist.

He knew he should put the carpetbag back and leave, but the liquor and his mood made him feel disinclined to move. He took the prayer book from the bag and began to leaf through it, as though it might tell him what to do. The moonlight caught its edge; and the ordinary prayer book transformed, became ragged and burnt. What he’d thought were prayers were now formulae, spells, incantations.

He turned the pages with growing disbelief. He had come to Joseph for reassurance, and found this instead? His uncle, his wife, and now this: it was as though they were conspiring against him, making him doubt everything he knew to be true.

On one page, smeared with what looked like dried mud, he read, in a slapdash handwriting he recognized as Joseph’s:

Rotfeld’s desires in a wife: Obedience. Curiosity. Intelligence. Virtuous and modest behavior.

Obedience innate. Intelligence the most difficult. Curiosity the most dangerous—but that is Rotfeld’s problem, not mine.

And then, farther on:

She is complete. A fine creation. Rotfeld sails tomorrow for New York.

She will make him an admirable wife, if she doesn’t destroy him first.

24.

I
n the lobby of an otherwise nondescript tenement near the Hudson River docklands, Yehudah Schaalman craned back his grizzled head and stared, perplexed, at an undulating metal ceiling.

He was perhaps half a mile from Hester Street as the crow flies, but it had taken him nearly an hour to come this far. The path had twisted and turned, through back alleyways and up fire escapes to well-traveled rooftops, across plank bridges and down again. At last he’d reached Washington Street, where he faced a baffling profusion of choices. The paths overlaid one another so that every storefront, every alley hummed with interest. He’d walked up and down the street, getting his bearings, until finally the strongest path had pulled him into the tenement with the well-lit lobby. Inside, the spell and the lights had conspired to lift his eyes upward.

He could not have said how long he stood beneath the shining waves and peaks, one hand stretching to the wall for balance. At first he thought it some sort of interesting defect of the building—perhaps the ceiling tiles had melted and begun to drip—before he realized it was a deliberate piece of art.

All at once, as it had for so many other viewers, the ceiling snapped into focus. The world spun—

It was dusk, and he stood on a scorched plain, ringed by distant peaks. The western sun stretched his shadow narrow as a spear, turned his arms to long gnarled branches, his fingers to twigs. Before him lay the late-summer valley, its animal inhabitants beginning to wake. He blinked—and there in the empty valley appeared a beautiful palace made all of glass, its spires and ramparts shining in the last golden rays of the evening.

Something hard and flat struck Schaalman across the face. It was the lobby floor.

He lay there, trying to regain his composure, the tile cool beneath his stinging cheek. Carefully he levered himself up to his hands and knees; the room, thankfully, stayed put. He stood and, shielding his eyes from the ceiling, walked out of the lobby and sat on the front steps, one hand to his throbbing face. The fear he’d felt earlier, in the hallway with the pregnant woman, returned and grew. Yet another phenomenon he could not explain.

He fought down his alarm, and the urge to retreat to the Sheltering House. He felt vulnerable, exposed. Who was his quarry? Was it this mysterious Ahmad? Or the Angel of Death, playing with him?

The pain in his swollen cheek began to dim. He made himself rise from the stoop and continue down the street. The paths danced and wove before him, pulling him toward whatever encounter awaited him next.

Shortly after one in the morning, the Golem abandoned her attempts at sewing. Distraction had made her clumsy, and the shirtwaist she’d been mending now sported a new rip in the bodice. The few waking souls who passed beyond her window were all drunk or had to use the water closet; they only added to her restlessness and anxiety.

Michael’s note lay on the table, the paper deeply wrinkled from when she’d crumpled it in frustration. The wording was so unlike him, too formal by half. His usual endearments were conspicuous in their absence. Was there something he wasn’t telling her? She thought of their conversation about Joseph Schall. Had Michael run afoul of him somehow? Oh, how she hated bare words on paper! How was she supposed to know the truth, without him there in front of her?