The Righteous Men (2006) (19 page)

‘Will,’ Tom said after his friend had spoken for nearly fifteen
uninterrupted minutes, trying to break his flow. ‘Will.’

No luck; he kept on talking. Finally, Tom had to break with his own iron
rule and raise his voice. ‘WILL!’

At last, he stopped.

‘Will, this is too serious for us to keep flailing around like amateurs.
We need expert help now.’

‘What, the police?’

‘Well, we should think about it.’

‘Of course I’ve fucking thought about it. I thought about it
when I had my head in the deep freeze. But I don’t think I can risk it. I
saw these people, Tom. They were ready to kill me tonight, on some hunch.
Because I wasn’t wearing a wire and because I do have a foreskin. Or some
such crazy nonsense. They were going to drown me. The guy gave me the full,
theological justification — all this stuff about Peking Nuff-said or whatever
it was. Essentially, you can take a life if it will save lives — and the
life they were thinking of taking this evening was mine. And maybe Beth’s.
So yes, I’ve thought about it, but what I think is, the risk is too
great. From the very beginning they’ve said it: if we go to the police,
she’s not safe. And now, having seen them — or not seen them I think
they mean it. They’re serious people. They’re not messing about.’

‘OK, so we need some other kind of help.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like Jews.’

‘What?’

‘We need to talk to someone Jewish who can begin to make sense of
everything you saw and heard. We know nothing. All we’ve got is what you
heard underwater and what we can get off the internet. It’s not enough.’

Will recognized the logic. It was true. He had been bluffing his way through
in that typically English way. They taught it in the best public schools:
bullshit studies. Learn to get by on native wit and charm. Never be anything so
boring as a qualified expert; be the gifted amateur. That’s what he had done
by marching into Crown Heights in his bloody chinos with his bloody notebook.
As if it would all fall into his charming English lap. They needed help.

‘Who?’

‘What about Joel?’

‘Joel Kaufman?’ He had been in the journalism programme with
Will at Columbia; he was now writing for the sports pages of
Newsday
. ‘He’s
Jewish but only technically. He barely knows more than I do.’

‘Ethan Greenberg?’

‘He’s in Hong Kong. For the Journal.’

‘This is pathetic. We’re in New York. We must know some Jews!’

‘I actually know plenty of Jews Will said, thinking suddenly of
Schwarz and Woodstein in the pod at work, which in turn reminded him that he
had made no contact with the office all day. He had ignored Harden’s
email. He would have to do something; he couldn’t just go AWOL. But it
was too much to think about; he shoved the thought aside, telling himself he
would deal with it as soon as he left Tom’s apartment.

‘The trouble is, I can’t start blabbing about this situation to
just anyone. The risk is too great. It has to be someone who is not just Jewish
but who’s smart enough to know Jewish things, who might know about this
world,’ he gestured towards the screen, still flickering with the map of
Eastern Parkway, ‘and who we can trust. I can’t think of anyone who
falls into that category.’

I can,’ said Tom, though his face registered no pleasure at the fact.

‘Who?’

‘TC.’

‘You can’t be serious. TC? To help Beth?’

‘Who else can do it, Will? Who else?’

Will fell back onto the couch, clenching his jaw, the muscle inside his
cheek tightening on and off as if pulsing with an alternating current. Once
again, Tom was right. TC checked all the boxes. She was Jewish, smart and would
never betray a secret. But how could he make that phone call? They had not
spoken in more than four years.

For nearly nine months, from the start of Columbia to that Memorial Day
weekend, they had been inseparable. She was a fine art student and Will had
fallen for her before either of them had said a word. He could not lie: it was
lust. She was the woman on campus everyone noticed, from the diamond stud in
her nose to the ring that pierced her belly button; from the flat, constantly
exposed midriff to the tint of blue running through her hair. Most women over
the age of sixteen could not carry off that look, but TC had enough natural beauty
to get away with it.

They had started dating straight away, becoming virtual recluses in his tiny
apartment on 113th and Amsterdam. They would have sex in the daytime, eat
Chinese food, see movies and have more sex until it was morning again.

Appearances were misleading. People saw the blue hair and the navel ring and
assumed TC was a wild, free spirit one of those girls in movies who leap onto
the roof to dance in the moonlight or take spontaneous rides to the shore to see
the fishing boats. Despite the piercings and torn jeans, TC was not like that.
Underneath that neo-hippy exterior, Will soon discovered a precise, analytical
brain that could be terrifying in its demand for exactitude. Conversation with TC
was a mental work-out: she let Will get away with nothing.

She seemed to have read everything — citing plot lines from Turgenev
one moment, the central doctrinal tenets of Lutheranism the next — and
have absorbed it all. The only crack in her armour, again defying all expectations,
was popular culture. She could get by on the most recent stuff, but dip into
the childhood memories she and Will were meant to share and she would become
clueless. Mention Grease and she assumed you meant Greece; refer to ‘Valley
Girls’ and she would ask, ‘Which valley?’ Will found it
endearing; besides, it was reassuring to know there was one area where the
human database he was dating had a defect. He concluded the two facts were
related: when kids like him were watching mindless TV and listening to trashy
pop, TC had been reading, reading, reading.

Mind you, all that was a guess. TC only spoke about her childhood in the
vaguest terms. (Even her name remained a mystery: a nickname she had got as a
toddler, she said, its origins forgotten.) He had never met her parents or
siblings: that would be impossible. Despite her own aggressively irreligious life
— she made a point of ordering jumbo shrimp and sweet and sour pork
— she explained that her family were still fairly traditional and they
would just not accept a Gentile boyfriend. ‘But we’re not getting
married!’ he would say. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ would be
the reply. ‘Even the theoretical possibility that one day we might, that
we are together at all, is bad enough. For them.’

They went through all the arguments. He would accuse her unseen parents
— and he never even glimpsed a photograph of them — of racism, as
bad as the prejudice of any anti-Semite who would bar his daughter going out
with a Jew. She would then walk him through the long, bloody course of Jewish history.
Knowledgeable as ever, she would tell how, across continents and down the
centuries, Jews had been tormented, clinging only perilously to their lives and
the civilization they had created. Jewish culture could not survive, people
like her parents believed, if it gradually dissolved, through intermarriage and
assimilation, into the general population — like a drop of blue hair-dye
in an ocean of clear water. ‘So that’s what your parents believe,’
Will would say. ‘What about you? What do you believe?’

Her answers were never clear enough, not for Will. The arguments became too
tiring. And, while the forbiddenness of their romance had been a thrill at
first, making them coconspirators in the Manhattan winter, by the spring it had
begun to pall. He did not like feeling that their fate was being decided by a
vast, external force — five thousand years of history — of which he
knew so little and over which he had no influence. By the time he met Beth, he
knew he and TC had run out of road.

It ended very badly. He had been a coward and started seeing Beth before
breaking off properly from TC: she had found a digital picture of the new
girlfriend on his computer. That was bad enough, but she was furious that what
they had come to call ‘the Jewish thing’ had proved so decisive. She
was angry with him for allowing that to be an obstacle — for rejecting
her because of ‘a fact about myself I cannot change’ — but he
always had the feeling the fury was not only directed at him. He could see she
was raging at a heritage, a culture,’ that she had mostly abandoned but
which had pulled her apart from a man she had loved. Their last conversation was
a shouting match. His last image of her was a face raw with tears.
Occasionally, he wondered who had won out: the uptight parents or the
blue-streaked world of art and adventure that had so enthralled the girl he had
fallen in love with.

Now Tom was suggesting he get in touch. Tonight, at nearly midnight. He had
her cell phone number; but what would he say? How would he explain that the
only reason he was making contact was because he needed something — and
that was for the sake of the woman who had stolen him from her? How would he
make that call? And why would she do anything but slam the phone down, vowing
never to speak to him again?

And yet, he was desperate and Tom was right. She was the closest thing to
the expert they needed. He would have to do it. He would have to put aside his
own emotions, including his cowardice, and dial that number. Now.

He paced up and down the room for a while, mentally scripting his opening.
It was like writing for the paper: once he had his first line, he had the
courage to plunge in, hoping instinct would take care of the rest. To increase
his chances for success, or at least to prevent immediate failure, he also played
a cheap trick.

He reckoned that if TC’s number was still stored on his phone, there
was at least a possibility that his lived on in her SIM card, too. He imagined
the sight of his name flashing up on her screen. So he called from Tom’s
line, knowing his number would be wholly unfamiliar. It was an ambush call.

‘Hello, TC? It’s Will.’ Loud noise in the background. A
club? A party?

‘Hi.’

‘Will Monroe.’

‘I don’t know any other Wills, Will. Not before, not since. What’s
up?’

He had to hand it to her: as an instant response, with barely a second’s
thinking time, that was not bad. And entirely typical: the hint of a put-down,
the reference to their past, the rapid-fire formulation. The only bum note was
that ‘what’s up?’ It was not her kind of phrase, the
lightness in it too forced. In those words, he heard the strain of speaking to
a man whom she had loved and who had rejected her.

‘I need to see you very soon. You know I wouldn’t trouble you
like this unless it was very important. And this is very important. I think it’s
a matter of life and death.’

He swallowed on that last word and he knew TC had heard him.

‘Is something wrong with your mom? Is she OK?’

‘It’s Beth. I know—’ He could not complete that
sentence: he was not sure what came next. ‘I need to see you right away.’

She did not ask any more questions. She just gave him her address. Not her
home, but her work: a complex of artists’ studios in Chelsea. She said it
would be nearer, but Will suspected there was another motive. Maybe she was
with someone else; perhaps she was ashamed still to be alone; or maybe she just
could not face the intimacy of having Will in her apartment.

Artists’ studios
. Even in that nugget of information, there was
a whole story. It meant she had made good her promise: she had dreamed of being
an artist, they talked about it through those long, bed afternoons. But he, and
even she, had wondered whether she had the nerve to go through with it. He was
glad she had done it. More than glad; proud.

Less than an hour later he found himself stepping out of
a service elevator, an old-style one complete with concertina iron gate. He
suspected this was not a mechanical necessity, but a bohemian affectation: the
artists’ colony in their converted factory. He emerged on the fourth
floor, silent and dark. He could just make out a corner reserved for a
sculptress who seemed to specialize in female bellies. He turned past what
looked like a metal workshop, but was in fact the workspace of a man who
created installations using neon.

Finally he saw a photocopied notice: TC. Just those two letters, no first or
last name. Smart branding, Will thought as he knocked lightly on the partition
door to announce his arrival.

Instinctively he had decided that male, English politeness would be his
defence against her female, all-American fury.

He had only a second or two to take it all in: walls covered with paintings,
three more on easels, yet more covered in bubble-wrap, leaned up against the
walls. A plain, battered table covered with clutter. On a counter that ran the
length of the back wall, artists’ materials — bottles of white
spirit; oil paints in bent, metal toothpaste tubes; glue; knives; various rusty
scrapers; string and, unaccountably, a cookery book which seemed to have lost
all its pages.

Towards the back of the room, on a threadbare red velvet couch, TC. She was
smaller than he remembered but nothing else was diminished: she was still a
woman who made you stare. Her hair was now shoulder length, where once it had been
punkily short. Most of it was a natural brown but for that trademark streak of
blue, still there. Taking in her flimsy, vaguely vintage shirt, above tight
jeans, torn at the knees, he could see the shape that had once made him weak.
In the semi-dark he spotted a glint of metal: the navel ring, still in place.

This had been the moment he was most uncertain of: should he hug her, kiss
her on the cheek, shake hands or do nothing? But she made the decision for him,
standing up and opening her arms as if welcoming back a prodigal son. He fell
into a hug and tried, through the positioning of his arms and hands, to make it
somehow — what was the word —
fraternal
.