The Righteous Men (2006) (26 page)

Will tried to peer over his shoulder, to skim the rest of the ancient text
at top speed. To him, it looked like the usual biblical mix of profundity and
obscurity. Scripture always had this effect on him: the words might make
stirring music, but their precise meaning only ever became clear through great effort.
Most of the time, in church or at morning prayers at school, the sounds just
washed over him. As they did now, in this odd, spontaneous prayer meeting.

Their leader was onto Verse 2: ‘Treasures of wickedness profit
nothing: but righteousness delivereth from death.’

Eyes down, Will was racing ahead. Confronted now with verse after verse of the
stuff, he found his eye lighting upon anything either immediately intelligible
or, better still, familiar. One word stood out, again and again. It had
appeared in Verse 2 and was there again in Verse 3.
The Lord will not suffer
the soul of the righteous to famish: but he casteth away the substance of the
wicked
.

And again in Verse 11.
The mouth of a righteous man is a well of life:
but violence covereth the mouth of the wicked
.

And in Verse 16.
The labour of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit
of the wicked to sin
.

Verse 2I had it too.
The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die
for want of wisdom
.

Wherever Will looked, the word seemed to jump off the page. In his
sleep-deprived state, he could almost hear voices, angry male voices, shouting the
word at him. There it was again, in Verse 24.
The fear of the wicked, it
shall come upon him: but the desire of the righteous shall be granted
.

Listening to the rambling murmur of the homeless man, he pictured the Rabbi
of Crown Heights swaying as he read Verse 25, his bearded disciples swaying
along with him.
As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the
righteous is an everlasting foundation
.

The word refused to let go. Verse 28 had it —
The hope of the
righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish
— and so did Verse 30:
The righteous shall never be removed: but the
wicked shall not inhabit the earth
.

It was even there at the very end, in the final verse.
The lips of the
righteous know what is acceptable: but the mouth of the wicked speaketh
perversity
.

The tramp now had his eyes shut, incanting the words from memory. But Will
had heard enough. He stood up and moved round, so he could whisper in TC’s
ear.

‘I’m going.’

He knew they could have discussed it for hours, parsing every clause for
multiple meanings like a pair of the sharpest Talmudical scholars. But
sometimes you just have to go with your first instinct. Journalism was like
that. You would be at a press conference, handed some voluminous document, and somehow
you would have to whip through it in five minutes, decide what it was all
about, ask your question and go. In truth, the document could not be read
properly in less than four or five hours, but journalists liked to think such
strictures were for lesser mortals.

So Will trusted his judgment. Besides, he was sick of talking, deciphering
and interpreting. He wanted to move, to go somewhere.

He had been inside for hours, inhaling air made sweet and sickly by fast
food.

He had heard what he needed to hear. He knew exactly where he had to go
— and he knew he would have to go there alone.

A
long line of elevators,
maybe ten of them, and barely a soul to elevate. All big offices were probably
like this on the weekends: still functioning, still with a guard at the front
desk and lights on in the canteen, but skeletal versions of their weekday
selves.

The lobby of The
New York Times
building looked especially bereft. On
Monday at 10am, this space would be jammed, as circulation managers jostled
with graphic designers to cram into elevators, half of them clutching steaming
cups of overpriced coffee. Now the same space was empty and silent, with only
the rarest ‘ping’ to announce that an elevator had moved up a few
floors and come back home again.

Will nodded a hello to the guard on duty who gave him the merest glance. He
was watching a ball game on a TV monitor that Will was sure was supposed to be
tuned to closed circuit pictures of the fire escape or rear entrance or
something.

Will swiped his card and headed to the newsroom.

He was glad to be here. He had not worked at the
Times
for long, but
this office felt familiar. And he could not face going home. Just the thought
of closing the front door and hearing the silence made him shudder. The
pictures on the wall; Beth’s clothes in the cupboard; her smell in the
bathroom.

Even imagining it scared him.

Besides, was this not what Yosef Yitzhok had told him to do in person,
before he began communicating by texted riddle?
Look to your work
. Now,
via Proverbs 10, he had been more specific.

Will’s pace quickened as he walked into the newsroom, deliberately
avoiding eye contact with anyone who might spot him. At this time of night it
was mainly production staff, not friends of his, but still Will kept his
peripheral vision switched off, focused only on reaching his desk.

As he got nearer, glimpsing something over the flimsy partition wall, his
heart thumped. There was a box, placed on his seat. Could this be what YY had
been talking about? Had he been perfectly literal?
Go to your office, it’s
all there waiting for you
. A box containing all the answers?

Will knew it was pure fantasy, but he could not help himself.

He sprinted the last yard or two, grabbed the box, feeling its weight and
tearing it open all at the same time. It was much lighter than its size had
suggested and hard to open too. Finally the two top leaves came apart, Will
stuck his arm inside and felt something soft and fleshy, like a fruit. What the
hell was this? He dug in deeper; it felt moist. He hooked his fingers through
some kind of opening and, using it as a handle, pulled up the entire object.

A Hallowe’en pumpkin. Will had poked his fingers through an eye socket.

Attached was a card.

The Better Relations Company invite you to a special evening …

Some bullshit PR freebie. Invitations for promotional events in New York had
become increasingly absurd and excessive: FedEx packages arriving at great
expense, containing a silver key which turned out to be the ticket for the
launch of the new Ericsson cell phone. The English Puritan in Will balked at
such conspicuous waste. He picked up the pumpkin and hurled it across the pod
towards a dustbin; it landed and split open by Schwarz’s desk.
He’ll
hardly notice
.

He glanced at the rest of the post: circulars and press releases.

A few seemed to be new deposits — an invite for a party at the British
Consulate in New York; a flyer for a convention hosted by some evangelical
outfit, the Church of the Reborn Jesus; a notice about the
Times
healthcare scheme — otherwise, the pile of paper was just as he had left
it on Monday, the last day he had been in the office.

That was nearly a week ago; it felt like a lifetime. It seemed like an
earlier, golden era — life before the kidnap. How lucky he had been,
flying out of New York, then bombing down the backroads of Montana with nothing
more grave on his mind than the fickle tastes of the National desk. Of course he
had not appreciated it: he had even been idiotic enough to feel glum about his
cock-up on the floods story. As if any of that mattered. One of Beth’s
favourite songs floated into his head, or rather just one line of it.
You
don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
… After a
second or two, he was not hearing Joni Mitchell’s voice but Beth’s.
She loved singing and he loved to listen to her. Gathering dust in the corner of
their living room was an old acoustic guitar, a memento of student days when
she would strum old songs of love and loss to herself. She sang only rarely these
days; Will would have to bribe her to do it. But when she did, his heart would soar.

Will could feel his eyes stinging. He wanted very badly to cry, to give into
this memory of his wife that had caught him unawares. He wanted to fall into a
chair, make a pillow of his arms and prolong the memory, to hold on to it the
way a child wants to catch a bubble, never letting it burst.

Instead he began searching for the notebook he had left here five days ago,
the one he had filled up in Brownsville, writing on both sides of the pages.

It was not under the press release pile, nor in the stack of magazines and
papers Will had already begun to accumulate, waiting to be clipped. (A job he
liked in theory but never got around to doing.) He checked the drawers, which
he had loaded on his first day with Post-its, a handful of contacts’ business
cards, batteries and an old cassette machine in case his mini-disc recorder
broke down. Not there. He looked back at the desk-chair and on the floor and
then rummaged through the papers all over again.

He looked around the pod, his eye stopping on the photo of Amy Woodstein’s
toddler son apparently wrestling with his mother, pushing her over from the
side. They were both smiling, Amy wearing an expression of relaxed joy that
neither she, nor anyone else, ever displayed in this newsroom.

Suddenly he heard Woodstein’s voice in his head.
My advice is to
lock up your notebooks when Terry’s around. And talk quietly when you ‘re
on the phone
.

Will turned himself around slowly. Neat as ever, Walton’s desk seemed
to carry no excess paper. Just the single yellow legal pad.

Will inched closer, his eyes instinctively darting left and right to check
no one was around. He ran his hands along the desk, as if to confirm through
touch that it really was as clear and empty as it looked. Nothing there. He
checked below the yellow pad, to see if there was another stashed underneath.
No.

Now his hand was moving towards the desk drawer. Still scoping the room, he
began to pull. It was locked.

Will sat himself in Terry Walton’s chair, ready to mount the search
for the key. He was sure it would be here somewhere: no one kept the key to a
desk-drawer on a ring, did they? Will ran his hand underneath the desk, hoping
to find it taped in place. Nothing.

He sat back in the chair. Where could it be? The desk held only the yellow
pad and a couple of lame mementos of Walton’s glory days as a foreign
correspondent: a bust of Lenin and, most bizarre, a snow-dome in which the
winter scene was not children sledging or reindeer riding but a fatherly-looking
Saddam Hussein, his arms outstretched, reaching out to a young boy and girl
running towards him.

Ba’athist kitsch, doubtless picked up when Walton covered the first
Gulf War. Without thinking, Will picked it up to give it a shake, to watch the
blizzard fall on the great Iraqi tyrant.

As the first flakes fell, he saw it. Stuck to the underside of this plastic
bauble — a thin, silver key.

‘Good evening, William.’

Will could feel his muscles seize up. He had been caught.

He swivelled his chair around.

The man was barely visible, standing in the half-light. Still, Will
recognized his profile before he could even make out the features. It was
Townsend McDougal, Executive Editor of The
New York Times
.

‘Oh, hello. Good evening.’ Will could hear the nerves, the exhaustion
and the panic in his own voice.

‘I’ve heard of eagerness and dedication, William, but this is
surely beyond the call of duty: spending Saturday night toiling not only at
your own desk, but at that of a colleague. Most industrious.’

‘Ah, yes. Sorry. I was … I was looking for something. I think I
might have left my notebook here. On Terry’s desk, I mean.’

McDougal made a show of craning his neck and peering at the desk, as if
searching it was a difficult task, when in fact it was uncluttered and visibly
empty.

‘Doesn’t seem to be here, does it, William?’

‘No, sir. It doesn’t.’ Will was embarrassed by that ‘sir’.
He was also aware of sitting so far back in his — Walton’s — chair,
he risked falling over. Like a man held at gunpoint.

‘We didn’t see you in the office yesterday, William. Harden wondered
if you had been kidnapped.’

Will felt a feverish chill run along his neck, as if he was fighting a
severe flu. He was so tired. ‘No, I was… I’ve been working on
something. On a story.’

‘What kind of story, William? Do you have another unlikely hero for
us? Another “diamond in the rough” like your saintly crack dealer?
Another organ-giving gun nut?’

Will had a dread thought. The editor was either mocking him or, much worse,
voicing scepticism. The paper had been burned before by young men in such a
hurry to make their mark that they had written works of short fiction rather
than journalism, which The
New York Times
had swallowed whole and
published on page one. People still spoke of the Jayson Blair scandal, which
had toppled one of Townsend’s predecessors.

Will realized what he now looked like. Unshaven and twitchy — and,
unaccountably, in the newsroom late on a Saturday night at someone else’s
desk. ‘It’s not what you think, sir.’ Will could hear his own
voice slurring with fatigue. His mouth was dry. ‘I just wanted to check
something about the Brownsville story. I was looking for my notebook and I thought
maybe Walton—’

‘Why would Walton want your notebook, William? Be careful not to
believe everything you hear in the newsroom. Remember, journalists don’t
always tell the truth.’

There it was again, another coded dig at Will and his stories. Was he
accusing him of faking the Macrae and Baxter tales, albeit in the genteel language
of a New England Brahmin? He may have had the accent and erect posture of a
Massachusetts aristocrat, but McDougal’s unblinking expression was the poker
face of a consummate office politician.