The Righteous Men (2006) (20 page)

‘What’s the problem, Will?’

He told her as methodically and briefly as he could: the email, Tom’s
tracing of it to Crown Heights, Will’s visit, the interrogation, the
trial by
mikve
.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said when that last detail
dropped, her face giving a smirk that was either disbelief, nervous tension,
schadenfreude or a little bit of all three. The semi-smile vanished when she
saw Will’s reaction. She could see this was deadly serious. ‘Will,
I feel for you, I really do.

And my heart goes out to Beth’s family.’ Beth. He had never heard
TC say her name before. ‘But what exactly do you need from me?’

‘I need to know what you know. I need you to explain to me what I
heard. I need you to translate for me.’

She responded with a small, wan smile that somehow made her look older. At
that moment, Will realized ageing was not chiefly about lines or wrinkles,
though those things played their part. The years really showed in expressions
like the one he had just seen. Suddenly TC’s was a face of years; of
knowledge.

‘OK. Very slowly and with as much detail as you can remember, you have
to tell me everything that happened. Every street you walked, every person you
met, every word they used. I’ll put some coffee on.’

Will fell back in the wicker chair TC had pulled up for him. For the first
time in sixteen hours, he let his muscles relax. He was so relieved: TC was on
side. He was filled with a sentiment he had never had when they were together;
he felt that TC was going to look after him.

She was, Will soon realized, a skilful interviewer, patient but methodical,
demanding that he be precise about each detail, going back over episodes to
ensure he had not missed anything. She pointed out contradictions too, in that
old forensic way of hers. ‘Hold on, you said there was only you and two
others in the room. Who is this new person?’ ‘What did he say
exactly? Did he say, “I will” or “I might”?’

Her precision exhausted him. By way of a break, he let his eyes wander
towards her work, scattered around the room. Large canvasses depicting classic
Americana — naturalistic paintings of a yellow cab or a vintage diner
— and, much as he admired their technical skill, he found himself
wondering if TC was not in the wrong line of work. She had too clear a mind,
too linear and logical, to be an artist. Surely with a brain like hers she
should be a scholar or a lawyer or, on current form, a police officer? Wisely,
he thought, Will did not say any of this.

By the time he had got to the end, he realized TC had so far explained
nothing. Each time she had opened her mouth, it was only to seek clarification
from him or to ask supplementary questions. He knew no more now than he had
when he left Crown Heights. He began to feel impatient. But he did not dare
voice his frustration; he had to keep TC as an ally. Besides, he was nearly
faint with fatigue; his words were starting to slur.

He woke when his elbow slipped off the chair arm. He could tell from the
taste in his mouth that he had fallen into a brief but deep sleep. He had
dreamed of chants and dances, with Beth at the centre, surrounded, like a
tribal queen, by men in white shirts and black suits.

Will looked at his watch; two-thirty am. So this was not a nightmare, just a
terrifying long day and night that seemed never to end. It had begun when he
powered up his BlackBerry some eighteen hours ago. And now, incredibly, he was
half-asleep in TC’s wicker chair and it was still going on.

‘Hi, you’re back,’ she said, suddenly looking up from an artist’s
sketch pad that rested on her knees. Her forehead was crinkled in a way, Will
remembered, that meant she had been concentrating hard. ‘Here’s
what we’ve got. The first fact is they say Beth is safe — so long
as you back off. Second, they seem to admit that she’s done nothing wrong
and maybe even nothing at all, but they cannot let her go. They acknowledge that
this seems baffling now but, they promise, it will all become clear. We know
from their emailed notes to you that they don’t want money. They just
want you to go away. That’s it.’

‘What this adds up to is one very weird kind of kidnapping. It’s
like they somehow want to borrow her for some unspecified time and some
unspecified reason — and they expect you just to take it. We need to work
out why.’ Will found that we comforting, even if the rest of the puzzle
— and the fact that TC had not instantly cracked it — was anything
but.

‘So what do we have on motive? A clue is surely that they feared you
were a fed. The charitable explanation for that is that they feared the feds
were coming after them simply because of the kidnapping. The uncharitable view
is that their fear was separate from the kidnapping, that they are involved in
some other criminal activity and had long worried that the authorities were
onto them. Kind of like those weirdo cults who lie in wait for the feds to come
and take their guns away.’

Will had a flash of memory back to Montana, Pat Baxter and his chums.
Christ, that was only a few days ago; it felt like years.

‘But then they rule that out, for fairly rational reasons. I don’t
know about the wire, but I reckon they’re right about the undercover Jew
thing: that is what the feds would do. Yet, your not being a federal agent does
not reassure them. Quite the opposite. It’s once they’ve ruled that
out that they get really heavy, nearly drowning you. That also makes some sense:
they wouldn’t dare mistreat you if they thought you were law enforcement.
Once you weren’t, they felt free. The question, though, is why? What
could be, to use their phrase, “infinitely worse”? A rival Hassidic
sect? A rival kidnapping cartel?’

Will detected a glint of mischief in TC’s eye, as if she was still
taken by the humour of Hassidim up to no good. It irritated him; and she still
had not come up with anything he did not know already.

‘What about all the Jewish stuff I heard, what does that all mean?’
He wanted to get her back on track.

‘Well, the phrase you heard as “Peking Nuff-said” is
actually
pikuach nefesh
. The safeguarding of a soul. It is usually used
benignly, to forgive various infractions of religious law in order to do good.
You know, you’ll hear the Israelis invoke
pikuach nefesh
to
explain why ambulances are allowed to run on the Sabbath. But by mentioning it
alongside all that stuff about a
rodef
, they were obviously using it to
threaten you to imply that Jewish law might allow them to kill you. Or Beth.’

Will winced.

‘As for “Shabbos something” that’s real. What you
heard was
Shabbos Shuva
, the Sabbath of repentance, the most important Shabbat
of the year. That’s today, as it happens. It’s the one between Rosh
Hashana, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We’re in the
middle of the Ten Days of Penitence, the Days of Awe. This is a big time for
Jews. For the ultra-orthodox especially. But what did your questioner mean by “we
have only four days left”? It’s true there are only four days till
Yom Kippur, but, judging from what you said, he meant it as some kind of
deadline. He can’t mean just four days left to repent, though they would
think that. This must be connected to the wider thing he mentioned: you know, “everything
hangs in the balance”, “the stakes could not be higher”, “the
ancient story”.’

‘And as far as all that stuff is concerned, we haven’t got a clue,
have we?’

TC had her head down, consulting her sketch pad. He could see she was
desperate to find something that would unlock this mystery. She had corralled
all the facts as best she could, organized a coherent set of questions. But
that’s all she had: questions. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘We
haven’t.’

‘What about the Rebbe?’

‘Ah, yes. Now I need you to think hard on this one. Did he ever say
his name to you? Did he ever introduce himself to you?’

‘I told you, he never let me see his face.’

‘So why are you so certain he was the Rebbe?’

‘Because they were all chanting and stamping and waiting for him
inside the synagogue. Then I get led away. These thugs say they can’t
talk to me until their “teacher” arrives. Then, when he does, they
do whatever he tells them to do. He was obviously the boss.’

‘When you were in the synagogue and you felt a hand on your shoulder,
and the voice said, “For you my friend, it’s all over” or
whatever he said, that voice was the same one who interrogated you later?’

‘Yes, same voice.’

‘So if that was the Rebbe how come the crowd was not facing in that
direction, looking towards him? If that were him, surely every face in the room
would have been looking just past your shoulder, going nuts for the guy who is
within whispering distance of your ear. But they weren’t, were they?’

‘Maybe he was just hidden from view, crushed in that huge crowd.’

‘Come on, Will. You said it yourself: they worship this guy as if he’s
the Messiah. They’re not going to just let him wander around, getting
mashed by the foot soldiers. Think hard, did he ever announce himself as the
Rebbe?’

Will realized with embarrassment that his tormentor had never said any such
thing. Now that he thought about it—

‘Did you ever address him as Rebbe?’

TC had read his mind. Throughout the ordeal, Will had assumed he was
speaking to the Rebbe. Inside his own head, he referred to him as Rebbe. But
had he ever used the term out loud?

‘So you’re sure that man who nearly had me killed tonight was
not the Rebbe?’

‘I know it.’

‘How? How can you be so certain?’

‘I’m certain, Will, because the Rebbe of Crown Heights has been
dead and buried for two years.’

T
hey were in a baking hot
country, on a wide bed covered by a vast white net. It was a suite in an old
colonial hotel. Sounds were floating up from the street below, car horns and traders;
a mosquito buzzed lazily. It was the afternoon and he and Beth were making
fevered love, their bodies slick with sweat …

Will’s heart thumped; the shock of waking from a dream. He looked down
to see a bed that was narrow — and empty. Except it was not quite a bed.
He had fallen asleep in TC’s studio, on her red velvet sofa. It turned
out she had a camp bed of her own behind a partition at the side of the studio.
‘Sometimes I work nights,’ she had said.

He reached instantly for his BlackBerry. Nothing more from the kidnappers;
two emails from Harden; several from his father, begging him to get in touch
and complaining of his desperate worry. His phone would not switch on: the battery
must have died when he was at Tom’s.

He tiptoed over to TC’s workbench, where he was relieved to see she
had the same brand of phone as him. There would be a charger here somewhere.
While looking, he spotted the sketch pad from last night. He turned it the
right way up and saw that TC had not been taking notes, but doing what seemed to
be an elaborate doodle. It formed a geometric pattern: circles linked by
straight lines, like one of those molecular diagrams. Was TC an expert chemist
on the side? It would not have surprised him.

Seeing her Hebrew doodles brought back with a thud the night’s
biggest, and most baffling, revelation. The Rebbe was dead. Despite the
pictures on every wall in Crown Heights, the websites covered with his face,
the constant references to him in the present tense, the sheer fervour aroused
by the mere sight of his chair — despite all this, TC had been adamant that
the Grand Rabbi of the Hassidic sect, the Rebbe, was deep in the ground.

He had died in his sleep two years earlier, plunging his entire community
and thousands of followers worldwide into abject grief. In the last years of
his life, the belief had grown that the Rebbe was not just an extraordinary
leader but something more. ‘Judaism holds that each generation includes
one person who is the candidate to be the Messiah,’ TC had explained. ‘That
doesn’t mean he actually is the Messiah. But if God decided the time had
come, that it was time for the Messianic era to begin, then this person, this candidate,
would be the one. He would be revealed as the
Moshiach
.’

‘And so they started thinking the Rebbe was the candidate?’

‘Exactly. That’s how it began. Just that he was the candidate
for this age. But then things started getting more intense. People started
saying this was not some remote, abstract possibility but that the Messianic
days were imminent, that the moment was approaching. Truth be told, I think the
Rebbe encouraged it. He whipped up this fervour.’

‘What, was he on some major ego trip?’

‘I don’t know if it was that. He was an amazingly modest man in
most ways. He lived frugally, in a few Spartan rooms in Crown Heights. After
his wife died, he confined himself to his study. He’d sleep in there, but
only for an hour or two at night; the rest of the time, the light would be on
and he’d be working, working, working. Dictating letters mostly; offering
advice to his people all over the world. You’ve got to realize, this is a
billion-dollar, global organization. They have centres in almost every city of
the world, even in really obscure places where there are hardly any Jews, just
in case there are Jewish travellers nearby who might feel the urge to have a
Sabbath meal. He would tell one of his emissaries, “You’re needed
in Greenland” and they’d go to Greenland. The Rebbe was like a
cross between the CEO of some huge multi-national corporation and the
Commandante of a revolutionary army.’ TC grinned. ‘He was Bill
Gates and Che Guevara, all rolled into one. And aged ninety-something.’

Will thought back to the picture of the twinkling old man with the
snow-white beard. An unlikely revolutionary.

‘Anyway, then he died and most people assumed that would be the end of
that. After all, he couldn’t exactly be the Messiah if he was dead, could
he?’