“What are we doing here?” Garfield asked. “You’re John Wayne all of a sudden, looking out for the little lady? She’s all the protection we’re going to get, and she takes her chances with us. Or we forget the whole thing and never listen to the radio or read the paper again for fear of finding out what it does next.” His voice was gentle in spite of his angry words. “Roger, Roger,” he said, “we can’t have no shit here. Shit’ll kill us. We need someone, and we can’t advertise, so it’s got to be her.”

Hawkins rested his forehead on his hands.

“It won’t work.”

“What would you do instead?” Garfield asked.

“Burn it, blow it up. Blow up the whole fucking bunch of them in their little white house. Kill them . . .”

Garfield touched his shoulder. “Darling,” he said. It was a common endearment in Russian, but sounded extreme in English. “Darling, wouldn’t the Germans have done that if they could? Wouldn’t they?”

Hawkins didn’t answer.

“They would,” Garfield said softly. Then he took a deep breath. “We’ll go at night while it’s . . . alone. Maybe. But not on Shabbes. I don’t know what the rule would be about killing golems on Shabbes anyway. . . .” It was a weak joke; the others didn’t even smile.

Garfield said, “The golem will have a word incised on his forehead.” He wrote the characters out for Hawkins. “The word is Emet, which means life, or God, or the infinite. This character”—he pointed to the first letter on the right—“is an aleph. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Rub it out and the word becomes met. Dead. Dead. We finish the ceremony, you go up to the thing, and with that hand of yours trembling with fury obliterate the first letter. Nu, the golem dies.”

Hawkins stared at him. “You can’t believe this,” he said softly.

“I don’t. But I’m not a cabalist.”

“You’re going to get us killed.”

“I’ve thought that over and over,” he said. “All night I thought, they’re going to die because of me; I’m going to die, too. Because I know it’s there. I know it’s meant to kill, has killed, could kill us. But what do we do, Inspector? Rachel? What? Tell me, I’ll listen.”

Neither Hawkins nor Rachel said anything. “Listen to me,” Garfield said softly. “That thing isn’t transistorized, it doesn’t run by computer. So something else makes it move. The old man said it’s hate. I believe him. Rage. I believe that, too. So, I say to myself, we must feel what they do. Match their passion with ours.