First Edition features new original works by Northern California Jewish writers. Appearing the first issue of each month, it includes a poem and an excerpt from a novel or short story.
Prague, Czech Republic, Spring 2011
Heap had followed the girl for days.
The watch was an important part of it, the most delicious part: sinking into the background while that wonderful brain of his roared in high gear, eyes, ears, everything finely tuned.
People tended to underestimate him. They always had. At Eton: two nights locked in a broom closet. At Oxford, they laughed, they did, the horsefaced girls and the cooing boys. And dear Papa, Lord of the Manor, Chancellor of the Purse Strings. All that school and you a bloody office boy.
But underestimated is close to unnoticed.
Heap capitalized on that.
She could be any girl who struck his fancy.
Eye the herd.
Cull.
The bright-eyed brunette in Brussels.
Her virtual twin in Barcelona.
The early work, glorious countryside afternoons, honing his technique.
The unmistakable tingle came on him like a fit of sick. Though Heap wasn’t fool enough to deny that he preferred a certain species: dark hair, sharp features. Lower class, not too bright, not bad-looking but well shy of pretty.
Smallish body, except he demanded a big chest. The soft, yielding pressure never failed to excite.
This one was perfect.
He had first spotted her walking east along the Charles Bridge. He’d been skulking round for two weeks by then, taking in the sights, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. He liked Prague. He’d visited before and never left disappointed.
Among the jean-clad magpies, the wattled American tourists, the leather-voiced buskers, and the minimally talented portrait artists, she had stood out for her modesty. Limp skirt, tight hair, focused and grim, she hurried along, cheeks carved out by the midmorning glare off the Vltava.
Perfect.
He tried to follow her but she melted into the crowd. The next day, he returned, hopeful, prepared, attentive. Opening his guidebook, he pretended to reread a gray box headed Did you know? The bridge had eggs mixed into its concrete for added strength. Good King Charles IV had commandeered every last egg in the kingdom, and they had obeyed, the stupid, slobbering masses, showing up to place them obsequiously at his royal feet.
Did Heap know?
Yes, he did. He knew everything worth knowing and much besides.
Even the guidebook underestimated him.
She passed again at the same time. And the day after that. Three days running he watched her. A girl of fixed habits. Lovely.
Her first stop was a café near the bridge. She donned a red apron, cleared tables for change. At dusk, she left Old Town for New Town, exchanged the red apron for a black one, bussing trays and refilling steins at a beer hall that, by the smell of it, catered to the locals. Photos of the entrées in the window showed sausages smothered in that vile, muddy sauce they put on everything.
From beneath the trolley stand, Heap watched her flit here and there. Twice passersby paused to ask him a question in Czech, which Heap took to mean that he appeared, as ever, unremarkable. He replied, in French, that he spoke no Czech.
At midnight, the girl finished mopping up. She doused the restaurant’s lights, and a few minutes later, a window two floors up blinked yellow, and her pale arm drew the blind.
It would be a squalid rented room, then. A sad and hopeless life.
Delicious.
He considered finding a way into her flat. Blitzing her in her own bedroom.
Appealing notion. But Heap despised senseless risk. It came of watching Papa burn thousands on football, cricket, anything involving imbeciles and a ball, pouring the fortune of centuries down the grimy throats of bookmakers. Never the most discriminating chap, Papa. How he loved to remind Heap that it would all be gone before Heap saw a penny. Heap was nothing like him and therefore deserved nothing.
Someday Heap would let him know what he thought of that.
To the task at hand: no sense changing the pattern. The pattern worked. He’d take her on the street like the others.
Leaving an empty-eyed shell propped against a dustbin or a wall, waiting to be discovered by some privileged citizen of the free world.
Heap examined an unmarked door to the right of the restaurant, six anonymous buzzer pushes. Never mind her name. He preferred to think of them numerically. Easier to catalog. He had the librarian’s spirit in him, he did. She would be number nine.
On the seventh night, a Thursday, Number Nine went up to her room as usual but reemerged soon after, a feather duster in one hand, a folded square of white cloth in the other.
He gave her slack, then followed north as she crossed into Old Town Square, uncomfortably alive with pedestrians. He clung to shadows on Maiselova as they entered Josefov, the former Jewish quarter.
Reprinted from “The Golem of Hollywood” by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman.
Jonathan Kellerman is the author of more than three dozen New York Times-bestselling crime novels, most recently “Guilt” and “Killer.” He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar and Anthony awards, and been nominated for the Shamus award. Jonathan and his wife, bestselling novelist Faye Kellerman, live in Southern California, New Mexico and New York.
Jesse Kellerman won the Princess Grace Award for best young American playwright and is the author of “Sunstroke,” “Trouble,” “The Genius” (for which he won the 2010 Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle), “The Executor” and “Potboiler.” He lives in Berkeley.
Works may be submitted to fiction editor Ilana DeBare at [email protected] or poetry editor Joan Gelfand at [email protected]. Fiction excerpts may run up to 2,500 words, but only 800 words will appear in the print edition, with the rest appearing online. All prose and poetry published to date can be viewed at jweeklylit.wordpress.com.