Chapter 27

Bruno felt OK. But he wanted to be feeling much better. He was entitled. Finding Gussie’s body had vindicated his abilities. He should have been celebrating. Instead, he was under a cloud, thanks to Peaches’ rumor-mongering.

Usually the drive out to the Pines relaxed him. Less than 10 years ago, Olga’s Diner was a reliable landmark. Once you passed Olga’s, you wouldn’t see so many strip malls and traffic would generally thin out. Now you had to use more flexible, but less precise indicators. Bruno found himself scanning the sky. As soon as he started seeing vultures rather than crows as the primary scavengers, he knew he was out of the suburbs and into … something else. You couldn’t even call it the country anymore. Marlton had grown up and, much as he hated to admit it, the Pines was no longer the refuge it once was. He’d been stuck in stop-and-go traffic for almost an hour and he was exhausted and out of sorts by the time he got home.

Even Maggie’s ecstatic welcome didn’t cheer him up. She sat and cocked an ear, which seemed to say, “Why sit around moping when we could be playing ball?” The thought of a saliva-covered tennis ball cheered him momentarily. Then he remembered the girl. They might have found Gussie’s body. But now they had two child murders and they needed to identify the perpetrator before anything else happened.

Bruno stretched out in his recliner. He picked up the NewGarden Biosciences annual report for the first time since he brought it home. Why had he been avoiding it? No answer. He thought about the receptionist. Why had she made it a point of giving it to him? She was beautiful in that decked-out professional sort of way. But the mask had come down for a moment when she’d called out to him. Her eyes seemed haunted. Were they really violet-colored or was she wearing contacts, using make up and choosing the right clothing for effect?

He looked at the annual report. It was printed on thick white stock with some sort of photo collage on the cover. Then he tried to open it. There were some tricky interlocking panels that puzzled him. He tried a couple of different approaches, then resorted to tearing the paper. Inside were the usual bar charts and several pages of text.

He flipped to the back and found what he was looking for. Executive headshots. Perfectly in focus and evenly lit with a warm, pleasant peach-colored light that formed a nice contrast with the potted plants in the background.

He started with Fischer. He looked him squarely in the eye and, after a few moments, succeeded in locking in. It was as if Fischer’s eyes were a video camera and his ears a microphone. Bruno could see what he was seeing, both visual and in his mind’s eye, and hear what he was hearing. He’d found Fischer at home, sitting in a well-appointed office. Leather chair, big wooden desk, silver writing instruments. And he was thinking about angels. That’s weird, thought Bruno.

Now he turned to the Jurevicius photo. His eyes were steely. He hadn’t really noticed that when they met in person. He concentrated and, again, locked in without difficulty. This time the connection seemed much narrower. He had no sense of where Jurevicius was physically. But all his attention was focused on a woman, lying in bed in what appeared to be a hospital room. The light was dim, and everything was a tone of white or light gray. White sheets and pillows, gray skin, white hair, light gray walls. She lay there sleeping, with a breathing tube and an IV drip from a bottle next to her bed. She appeared to be quite ill, though stable, not in danger of dying. There was a crucifix on the wall behind the bed, which gave the scene a foreign feel, probably French, given Jurevicius’ background. And that was it. No movement. No change. Was Jurevicius staring at a photograph? Meditating? Or was there something wrong with the connection?

Bruno broke off and tried to look at more of the report. There were more paper folding problems that needed to be solved, this time involving Velcro fasteners and metal cleats. Eventually, he reached the prize. It was a formal legal document that he eyed with dread. Was he actually going to have to read all of it for clues?

He started scanning: Management’s discussion and analysis of results. Ticker symbol—NGBS. Stock price—basically flat. Resistance to biotech in overseas markets. Fischer founded the company about a dozen years ago. Partial buyout by a French venture capital firm, LHOQ, a year later. LHOQ was a minority investor at first, but kept increasing its stake. That explained Jurevicius’ role. But where did that leave Fischer?

It was hard to see how any of this mattered to the case. Bruno tossed the K-1 on the floor and tried to fold the rest of the report back into its original configuration. Without much luck. Finally, Maggie settled the issue by dropping her tennis ball in his lap. That was a sign. It really was time to stretch the old legs and get some fresh air.

Though it had been a warm day, it cooled quickly at night; the familiar smell of wood smoke clogged the air. It was overcast, with few stars visible and only a glimpse of a fragment of the moon from time to time.

Rural Tabernacle didn’t have streetlights, but the neighborhood was filling in with homes on 5- to 10-acre lots. Some of them were those enormous 5,000-square-foot jobs. One of them had a copper turret and looked like a chateau. A few even had paddocks for horses.

Bruno couldn’t wait for his washing machine to die so he could move it out to the front yard. There just wasn’t the same sense of privacy or peace of mind that had brought him to the Pines in the first place. Along with the woodsmoke he felt the burden of people’s thoughts, confusing background noise.

They turned the corner and headed back to the trailer. Maggie kept trying to run off and check out Carmine, but Bruno called her back. He needed company. Back inside he thought about the Chief chatting up Dora. It all seemed very natural. He didn’t know anything about Buddy Black’s personal life. Was he married? Single? Divorced? Other? Nah, not the Chief.

How come when Bruno ran into anyone it was a sociopath like Peaches?

He gave wide berth to the NGBS annual report and grabbed his copy of the Complete Shmegegge instead. He seemed to recall that there was a chapter on Golems in it. How to make them at home. Just what he needed. Companionship. Seeking long-term committed relationship with nice Jewish monster (female). No family hang-ups or strings attached. Uninhibited sexuality a must.

The chapter was prefaced with a number of warnings: CAUTION: FOR EXPERIENCED STUDENTS ONLY. DO NOT TRY THIS ALONE. Funny they’d put something dangerous and difficult in a Complete Shmegegge book. Golem making was supposed to be the most super-secret part of the Kabbalah. Well, Maggie’d be there to keep an eye on him. He trusted her judgment more than that of most people.

As usual, the section began with an annoying whimsical sidebar. It was headed, “The first biotechnologist?” and quoted a 1^st-century Rabbi named Yehoshua ben Chananya, who said, “I can take squashes and pumpkins and, with the Sefer Yetzirah, make them into beautiful trees.” Well, that was something. He’d have to remember to mention that to Dr. Jurevicius, or to Fischer, next time he saw them …

He read further and learned that the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, was the oldest book of the Kabbalah. The basic idea was pretty simple. Since God created the universe, and everything else, by speaking words, and since words are made up of letters of the alphabet … Kabbalists can control the creative forces of the universe by manipulating the letters properly.

Then it started getting complicated. There were several different prescriptions for making Golems. And you could do it one way to create a male Golem and a different way for a female. That was good.

But then there were different instructions from different Rabbis. In Rabbi Abulafia’s system, you had to sound out different letters in a special order, and also breathe and bob your head a certain way. This allowed you to create each part of the Golem’s body separately. But it took 35 hours of non-stop chanting to bring the entire being to life.

More accessible was the system of the Riva, where you had to recite a smaller number of paired sounds while moving in a circle. Bruno tried the sounds, “Uu-Yu; Aa-Ya; Ii-Yi; Ee-Ye; Oo-Yo; Bu-Yu; Ba-Ya; Bi-Yi; Be-Ye; Bo-Yo.” That wasn’t so bad. “Bo-Yo, Bo-Yo, Bo-Yo,” he hummed. But that was just the chanting.

You also had to make a life-sized figure out of soil from a place that no one has ever dug and knead it with pure spring water right out of the ground … That might be a problem. He was pretty sure he could get by with Kabbalah Water, the brand they sold on the Kabbalah Co-op’s website. But unless he could order the dirt online, too, he was probably out of luck. Where could you go in Jersey where no one had been before? Reading further, he saw that the practitioner also needed to wear special clothes and be spiritually and mentally purified. What was that supposed to mean?

To make matters worse, if you did it wrong—in other words, if your circle was going in the wrong direction—you could get trapped in the earth up to your waist and never get out, unless a Rabbi who knew how to do the Golem business correctly came along and got you out.

All of this for a cheap date? It’d be easier and cheaper to fly out to Vegas. You’d have to be a complete shmegegge to try making a Golem with instructions like these. He checked the acknowledgements to see if they’d outsourced parts of the writing to Japan or Korea. Then he let the book drop to the floor and shuffled off to bed.