The Golem of Paris (20 page)

E
ven then, she wouldn’t say the name out loud.

“We had a deal, Zina.”

She had turned pale. She took his pen and pad with trembling hands and wrote.

Тремсин

Jacob said, “English?”

She hesitated, then added
Tremsin.

“That’s good,” he said. “That’s his last name?”

Nod.

“First name?”

She scrawled.

Arkady.

“Arkady Tremsin.”

A violent tremor ran through her.

“All right,” he said. “Now tell me what happened.”

“I told you, I was not there.”

“You must have seen something or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Zina glanced at Katie in the unmarked’s rear window. “Night, I
am cleaning oven. There is knock. ‘Go away, we are closed.’ Knocking, knocking. I go out, man is there.”

“Tremsin.”

She shuddered. “Another.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know him.”

“What does Tremsin have to do with it, then?”

“He works for him.”

“You know that because . . .”

“People say.”

“Which people?”

“No one,” she said. “Everyone. It’s ten years ago.”

“So you let this other guy in.”

“He was not asking permission.”

“Why did he come to you?”

She said, “He was coming few times before. To buy food.” A tart smile. “He says he is here with his boss, on vacation. His boss says I make
vatrushki
like home.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“He told me, ‘Go home.’ I went.”

“Did he give you anything? Money?”

Zina bit her lip. “No.”

He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t want to shut her down. “Okay. Go on.”

“In morning I come to work, there are many police cars.”

“He used one of your garbage cans,” Jacob said. “To prop the mother’s body.”

“I never saw nothing.”

“Why didn’t you tell the cops about him?”

She stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

“What did he look like?”

She shook her head. She had begun to withdraw.

“Did he kill them inside the bakery?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there blood?”

“No,” she said.

“What did—”

“No more,” she said.

He started to press, but her face had hardened and she was looking toward the unmarked. She said, “I can’t save her always.”

He’d hit the limit. “All right,” he said. “I’ll give her to you.”

“She won’t like this,” Zinaida Moskvina said. “She will like you better.”

•   •   •

B
ACK HOME
, he opened the laptop, the bourbon he’d earlier denied himself tucked between two couch cushions. It was two-thirty in the morning.

He typed in
Arkady Tremsin.

The sheer number of hits gave him a sense of the scale of Zina’s fear.

Arkady Lavrentyevich Tremsin, age sixty-three, founder of Metallurgy TechAnsch ZAO, one of Russia’s largest refineries. Wikipedia, citing
Forbes
, put his net worth at $850 million.

Three years ago, he had abruptly resigned and moved to Paris. The reason for his departure was subject to enthusiastic conjecture, everything from a sex scandal to financial hanky-panky. He’d kept a low profile ever since, shunning public appearances and giving no interviews. The past spring, the Russian government had frozen his
assets and seized a controlling share of TechAnsch, citing failure to pay tax. Lawsuits were ongoing.

However much money he’d left behind, the presumption was he had hidden plenty more in offshore accounts—enough to ride out exile in luxury.

Image search returned a pinkish man with melting features. It was not so much that he was fat, but that he lacked foundations; the underlying structures were sunken, resulting in a flat, indistinct mien. More recent photos were pixelated, long-lens shots of a white head, surrounded by bodyguards, as it ducked into a limousine.

Susan Lomax might be able to positively ID him. In the meantime, Jacob reviewed the notes from their conversation.

Big and tall; ugly black ring.

Nestled amid the shoulders and elbows and marble faces, Tremsin was about the same height as his bodyguards. No shots of his hands, but no big deal. Appearances changed. In the end, it was his pattern of behavior that carried the most weight.

Jacob began excavating the past.

•   •   •

T
HE GUY WAS NOWHERE
, and then everywhere, and then nowhere again.

Prior to 2002, he seemed not to exist. Then his name began popping up on finance blogs and in industrial trade journals, most of them in Russian. Jacob hobbled along, leaning on translation websites, e-mailing Mallick to request an interpreter ASAP.

The mother lode came in the form of a fifteen-thousand-word profile, originally published in
Novaya Gazeta
in 2006, later serialized by the British
Financial Times
.

It opened with a description of the flat Tremsin had grown up in,
twenty-eight square meters in Moscow’s Kapotnya District, overlooking the mammoth oil refinery where his father worked. As a child, he had suffered lung problems and for a period was confined to bed. His mother left a bookkeeping job to care for him full-time, enforcing a grueling regimen of calisthenics and rote memorization, so that little Arkasha returned to school physically robust and three years ahead of his peers.

The arrangement of the murder scene rose up in Jacob’s mind.

Mother and son, in wide-eyed concentration; a lesson in progress.

What kind of pressure pushed a child that far out in front of the pack?

The author of the piece, Natalia Honcharenko, struggled to contain her distaste for her subject, writing in a tone that periodically flared from cynicism into outright paranoia. An inevitable flaw, Jacob thought, of a culture so long lied to.

At some point, though, even she had to cop to Tremsin’s brilliance. His former instructors at Moscow State University recalled him with awe. At twenty-three, he’d earned a first-level doctorate in applied chemistry, an unheard-of feat.

Jacob examined the inset photo.

Kandidat
Tremsin wore mutton chops and boxy eyeglasses.

In 1975, he moved to Leningrad, ostensibly to take up a teaching position. Honcharenko claimed otherwise, citing an anonymous source who put Tremsin at the 401st KGB school. It was there, she wrote, that he had met and befriended the man who would later enable his vault to the top of the food chain.

Dr. Tremsin and President Putin found multiple points of common ground. Both men enjoyed the outdoors, and colleagues remember them as frequent walking companions
in the Alexander Gardens. Sometimes these walks would turn into contests of strength—races, or wrestling matches.

“They had a bit of a rivalry,” says a former classmate, speaking anonymously.

“Most of the time it was good-natured. You must remember that the KGB is a very competitive place, attracting the most competitive people and encouraging that trait.”

Asked which man was the dominant personality, the classmate says, “I would say it’s a matter of perspective. Putin gave the orders, he gave orders to everyone. At the same time, Arkasha could get under his skin in a way that nobody else could.”

One incident stands out as exemplary.

“It must have been late January,” the classmate continues. “The Neva was frozen solid, and the boys were talking about getting together to cut holes in the ice and take a swim.

“Putin declined, giving the excuse that he had gone the previous week. As he said this, Tremsin got a mischievous look on his face. He said, ‘But, Vladimir Vladimirovich, when did you go? I was with you Sunday, we had work the rest of the days. Maybe you meant the week before? But that can’t be, that was New Year . . . Did you go at night? No, that isn’t possible, you’d never be so foolish, you could have an accident and nobody would be there to pull you out . . . So when did you go?’

“Putin turned a frightful color. He said nothing, but we could see how furious he was.

“The next day, Tremsin shows up with his arm in a sling, a bruise on his face. He could not stop laughing about it.

“This sort of thing happened on several occasions. The funny thing was, it didn’t seem to harm their relationship.
Soon enough Putin would be laughing, too. Not many people could make him laugh.”

Indeed, this talent would stand Tremsin in good stead in years to come . . .

Starting in 1977, he went to work for Norilsk, the Soviet government’s gigantic nickel concern. His official title was research scientist; he was the principal author on dozens of papers, coauthor of dozens more. In 1978 he earned a second-level doctorate, becoming a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and receiving a civilian medal for “contributions to the development of techniques leading to greater efficiency in the electrolytic refinement of copper.”

Honcharenko dismissed the Norilsk job as a cover. His real work, she alleged, took place at Laboratory 12, the KGB’s division for poisons and chemical weapons.

As before, her proof was thin. A handful of KGB files had been opened to the public, but most remained classified.

One indication of Tremsin’s special status lay in his freedom of movement, far greater than that of the average Soviet citizen. His name turned up on the rosters of chemistry conferences across the globe; he’d spent academic year 1978–79 in Paris, lecturing at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, as part of a Franco-Soviet exchange program.

A brief marriage produced no children and ended in divorce. Lingering acrimony prompted his ex-wife, who worked at the Ministry of Information and Press, to denounce him as a homosexual—a crime punishable by up to five years’ hard labor.

Somehow, Tremsin avoided this more serious fate. In April 1981, he was dismissed from his post at Norilsk, and within the week had left Moscow for Prague.

J
acob stared at the screen, which seemed to be molting, letters falling like scales.

She went to Prague.

She was never the same after that.

He shifted the laptop to the table, killed the bourbon, headed to the kitchen. Along the way, the empty slipped from his grasp, thudding to the carpet.

Uncapping a fresh bottle, he took slow, steady drafts until the liquor hovered waist-high in the bottle. He set it on the counter and returned to the sofa.

The screen saver had kicked in, LAPD shield bouncing from corner to corner. He touched the space bar and the text reappeared like a slap.

Honcharenko could locate no official record of Tremsin’s activities in Czechoslovakia. She had, however, managed to track down a requisition form bearing his signature, from a Prague psychiatric hospital called Bohnice. A former nurse at the facility—speaking on condition of anonymity, like every other source—named him as the head of the inpatient ward, starting in the spring of 1981.

When I asked how Dr. Tremsin, a Russian chemist with no formal medical education, had come to occupy a position of authority at a Czechoslovakian hospital, the nurse laughed.

“His qualifications were irrelevant. He was brought in for one purpose alone: to tighten the taps.”

I asked what she meant by that. She explained that the previous director had released a patient of whom he was unduly fond.

“As it turned out, he had been duped. The patient was KGB, a
vlaštovka
, and after she got out, she proceeded to defect. The administration was humiliated. Moscow was furious. They blamed the Czechs and demanded action. They sacked the old staff and replaced them with their own people. I survived the purge only because I spoke Russian well. They needed at least a few people who could communicate with the patients.”

Perhaps the nurse was scared, or else she had things on her conscience that didn’t sit well: she declined to detail Tremsin’s work on the ward, leaving Honcharenko to indulge in more suggestive speculation.

Whatever project occupied Dr. Tremsin’s time in Czechoslovakia, it seems he attained enough success to make him valuable to Moscow once again. In January 1983, he was reinstated at Norilsk, where he became involved with

Jacob went back.

Eighty-one through eighty-three.

Overlapping Bina’s visit.

She was never the same after that.

•   •   •

T
HE REMAINDER O
F THE ARTICLE
covered the periods pre– and post–Berlin Wall; Tremsin’s patient accumulation of friends and resources; the rise of the first wave of oligarchs under Yeltsin and their dismantling at Putin’s hands. Between 1999 and 2004, the list of Russia’s richest men turned over completely, leaving Tremsin bobbing comfortably in the middle of the pack.

All the same, he maintained a relatively modest lifestyle. It was chemistry that Tremsin loved; the fact that his passion happened to generate reams of cash was immaterial. Honcharenko played up the contrast between his childhood home and his current residence, a seven-bedroom flat on Moscow’s Ostozhenka Street that sat unoccupied most months. Typically, Tremsin preferred to stay at his dacha, driving distance to the TechAnsch campus in Shchyolkovo. Foremen cited him as a frequent visitor to the refinery floor.

Jacob had a hard time seeing him as the driver of a Gerhardt Falke S.

Maybe he’d brought it to a friend’s house for dinner, in lieu of wine.

Please enjoy these eleven hundred horsepower as a token of my gratitude.

Published several years before his fall from grace, the article ended on an ambivalent note.

What will become of Russia if it is populated by men like Tremsin, men for whom nothing is too costly, and for whom nothing has value?

Hoping for follow-up, Jacob opened the
Novaya Gazeta
homepage, clicked the little British flag to bring up the English-language edition. He typed Natalia Honcharenko’s name into the search box.

The first item that came up was from 2008.

Not by Honcharenko, but about her.

JOURNALIST’S COLLEAGUES REMEMBER, CELEBRATE HER BRAVERY

MOSCOW, May 21—Somber and frightened, angry and grieving, they gathered in the basement of the Bar Ogonek to pay tribute to their fallen colleague.

One year ago, thirty-two-year-old Natalia Romanovna Honcharenko, an award-winning journalist for this paper, was gunned down outside her apartment.

The case remains unsolved.

“We thought about using the church around the corner,” said Alexei Kozadayev, an editor who worked with Honcharenko on a series of articles exposing corruption in Moscow’s Department of Urban Development.

“We decided that this would be more to Natka’s taste. She came here often after work. And we should remember that she was not one to bow to authority.”

Several of the evening’s attendees echoed this theme: Honcharenko’s unrelenting thirst for truth.

“She ruffled their feathers,” remarked Renata Givental, a fellow journalist who has written for
Novaya Gazeta
and
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
. “They want us to be afraid.”

Givental declined to specify who “they” were, adding, “Anyone with half a brain can figure it out.”

While Honcharenko’s friends and coworkers may consider it obvious who is responsible for her death, police maintain a more circumspect attitude.

Praporshchik Yury Filippov, speaking on behalf of the GUVD, said, “We continue to examine all possibilities.”

Jacob scrolled down the list of articles to find when the story broke.

June 2007, about nine months after Honcharenko’s profile on Tremsin first appeared.

A masked man rode up on a motorcycle as she left her building. He pulled a handgun, shot her once in the back of the head, twice more when she fell, and drove off.

No shortage of suspects. Therein lay the problem. She was an investigative journalist in the new Russia. Threats came with the territory, and pissing off powerful people was her stock-in-trade. Among those she had vivisected in print, Tremsin was neither the most prominent nor the most notorious.

Jacob searched for hours without finding further information about Tremsin’s tenure in Czechoslovakia. It stood to reason that few writers would want to tackle the subject, given what had happened to Honcharenko.

He needed that interpreter, badly. He sent Mallick a second request, then returned to the
FT
profile, reading and rereading the Prague section, scrutinizing every turn of phrase with Talmudic fervor. He felt like he was tilting a photograph, trying to fudge the angle: it was all tantalizing surface. He googled TechAnsch, Norilsk, Laboratory 12. Plenty to read. Nothing of substance.

He googled
vlaštovka.

The first line of the first hit bounced him out of his seat.

Native to every continent except Australia and Antarctica, the barn swallow is the most common species of swallow in the world.

Sweating, he clicked the link.

The Web page showed a picture of a little bird, perched delicately on a branch.

Mashed potatoes, rising to life.

His mother, choking on bread.

Swallowing it down.

She had been talking to him all along.

He hadn’t been listening.

A hot tide rose in his own throat.

He stumbled to the bathroom and heaved up fifty dollars’ worth of booze. He rinsed his mouth until it stopped burning; tore off his shirt and ran a cold washcloth over his body.

In the bedroom he lay down on the unmade sheets. He gave himself ninety minutes to sleep, setting an alarm for eight-thirty in the morning, late afternoon in Prague.

•   •   •

J
ACOB HAD
L
IEUTENA
NT
J
AN
C
HRPA
’
S
number listed in his phone under
Czech Detective.
He didn’t know if it was current. The voice that answered
ahoj
sounded different, free of wheezy edge. But the background track was identical: kids, screaming.

How long had they been at it? Two years running?

Jacob said, “Can’t you turn on the television or something?”

There was a pause.

“This is the problem,” Jan said. “They fight about what to watch.”

A bark in Czech, a dip in the noise, a return to full strength within moments.

“Hold please,” Jan muttered.

Jacob stretched out on his couch. He’d taken four Advil and eaten a piece of dry toast; physically, he felt a little less horrible, but his nightmares continued to reverberate.

An attic, a garden, Bina’s twitching hands.

As he listened to the bickering fade, it occurred to him that he knew next to nothing about Jan’s personal life, other than that he
had a sister. Originally he’d assumed the kids to be Jan’s own. Later he’d changed his mind and decided they were younger siblings. He still didn’t have the answer. He didn’t know if Jan was married or gay or lived with his parents or what. They’d talked on the phone a couple of times and spent a single morning together, reconstructing a brutal crime.

Yet he knew that Jan would remember him. What they shared was indelible. More than victory, it was trauma that united men.

Jan came back on the line. “I’m happy to hear from you.”

“Same here. You sound good.”

“I’m okay, yes.”

Jacob was glad to take a few minutes to shoot the shit. He asked after Jan’s sister, Lenka, and got an annoyed sigh in return.

“She is becoming a police officer.”

“No kidding. She went through with it?”

“I told her this is a terrible idea. She doesn’t listen. For this I blame you.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“After you left, she was talking about you very often. I told her, forget this guy, he is bad news.”

“I’d like to be offended, but you’re probably right.”

“Of course I am right. You are dangerous. You come to Prague, you ask questions I don’t want to answer. I answer you anyway. Then you leave and I don’t hear jack shit.”

“Your English has really improved,” Jacob said.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“After the case broke, they shut me down. I couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

“Cockblock,” Jan said.

Jacob laughed, releasing some of the tension in his chest. “I wanted to call. They were monitoring my phone and e-mail. I didn’t want to cause more problems for you.”

“It’s okay. I forgive you. But, Jacob, it was a very weird thing. Before I met you, I was in a lot of trouble.”

“I remember.”

“Then, two, three months after you went, my boss, he called me to his office. ‘Congratulations, you are getting a promotion.’”

“Huh.”

“Yes, but it is more weird.” An uptick in Jan’s breathing, a hint of the former rasp. “Before, I was
poručík
, lieutenant. After this comes
nadporučík
. My boss, he tells me they are making him
major
, and I will be
kapitán
. This is not normal.”

“After I was pulled off the case, they gave me ten thousand dollars,” Jacob said.

There was a pause before Jan asked, “Who are these people?”

Jacob didn’t like lying to him. He said, “I don’t know how to answer you,” hoping the distinction between that and
I don’t know
would be lost.

Jan grunted. “I never learned who killed this person.”

Jacob recited LAPD’s official version of the story: acting with an accomplice, Richard Pernath was responsible for the murder of a former accomplice, Terrence Florack. Scotland Yard, accepting this explanation, had closed the file on the slaying of yet another accomplice, British national Reggie Heap, on foreign soil.

“I don’t think you’re telling me everything,” Jan said.

Jacob said, “Believe me: it’s for your benefit.”

Jan was silent a moment. “The person who did it. He’s getting punished?”

Jacob thought about the sorrow in Mai’s eyes in the instant before she left him.

“No doubt about it,” he said.

•   •   •

J
AN ABSORB
ED THE DETAILS
of the Duvall/White homicide without comment.

Jacob said, “This guy Tremsin was in Prague in the early eighties. He ran a psych ward at a place called Bohnice.”

“I know it,” Jan said.

“It’s still there?”

“Yes, yes. They have many crazy people.”

“Can you get in touch with them?”

“I will try. You wonder if Tremsin’s doing the same thing here.”

“It’s a question worth asking.”

“I agree. But it will not be simple to learn. After Communism, there is a lot of confusion. The files are not complete, many were destroyed.”

Jacob pictured the Vollmer Archive, writ huge. “I get it.”

“This is terrible,” Jan said, “the mother and the son.”

Jacob saw Bina cradling the photo of Thomas White Jr.

The mutilated face.

The endless stare.

She recognized it.

She’d seen it before.

“What I think,” Jan was saying, “is to talk to ÚDV. This is the division for special cases that could not be investigated before, for political reasons.”

“If Tremsin was working for the KGB, he probably had local protection.”

“Yes, no, maybe. We have the files for StB, not KGB. There was not a lot of cooperation, they did not like each other. Did you ask the Russians?”

“I’m waiting on a translator. I have a feeling they’re not going to talk so easily.”

“I think you are right.”

“Do me a favor? Ask around anyway. Anything helps. Whatever you can dig up.”

“You are coming back to Prague?”

“To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it. I’d love to, though. Someday.” Jacob laughed. “I still owe you a beer.”

Jan said, “Now you owe me two.”