The cardinal, who had instigated the raid on the ghetto, stayed in his palace. His advisers pleaded with him to make peace with the rabbi. At first he was proud and resisted; then he saw the light of the fires, and he went out on his balcony and saw the cobbles of the streets of Prague covered with blood. He dressed himself in the red robe of his office and rode through the streets of the city toward the ghetto. What he saw on the way appalled and humbled him, and by the time he reached the Altneushul where Rabbi Loew prayed alone in the dark, he was a shaken man, and even though he’d hated the Jews and been their chief enemy for years, he swore to the rabbi that the Jews of Prague would be safe forever if the rabbi would stop the golem. In spite of everything he had done, Rabbi Loew felt sorry for the cardinal. He explained as gently as he could that he would have stopped the golem hours ago, but if he set foot outside the ghetto, the citizens of Prague would kill him on sight. The old cardinal looked crafty. “Would the golem die with you, rabbi?” he asked. “Aren’t you, after all, the spirit of the thing?”

Loew looked into the man’s eyes and, still in a gentle voice, said to the prince of the Church, “I don’t know. But if I die and the golem doesn’t, it might, since it has gone mad, destroy the world.” Then the rabbi told the cardinal that if he couldn’t stop the golem the cardinal should order his guards to kill him in the hope that the monster would die with him. The cardinal wept when he realized what a good man the rabbi was.

“I’ll go with you,” he told the rabbi. “You’ll be safe with me.”

The two men, one in black, one in red, left the ghetto together to look for the golem. They passed the bodies of the people, even children, who’d been smashed against and walls by the creature. Some of them were still alive . . .

Rachel looked at the picture of them, covered with blood, arms and legs at crazy angles.

. . . and they reached out to the rabbi and cardinal as they passed. They followed the trail of corpses and dying through the city to the river, and there at dawn, Rabbi Loew found his creation.