The Righteous Men (2006) (28 page)

It was late, and quiet. In normal circumstances, Will liked this vibe.
Working at a time when the rest of the city was not; leaving a half-empty
office and walking into the Manhattan evening. It was such a contrast with the
usual throng that bustled down this street. No one around, save a lonely
tourist in sleeveless body-warmer and baseball hat peering into one of the
Times
display windows, doubtless looking at an antique printing press or a framed
photograph of the late Mr Sulzberger shaking hands with Harry Truman or
something. He must be cold, standing around outside. But Will was in a hurry to
get away. He barely saw him.

T
C’s room was just how
he would have imagined it and, he realized now, he had indeed imagined it.
Perhaps a dozen times since his marriage to Beth he had thought about TC not
just for a second or two, but in long, extended sessions. Daydreams, really, in
which he had brought back to himself her face, her voice, her smell. In these
reveries of thought sometimes staring out of an aeroplane window, sometimes during
a night drive while Beth slept in the passenger seat next to him — he had
followed TC out of the past they had shared and into the present he could only
imagine. He would work hard to conjure her face, four years older. Or to see
her at work. Or to picture the man she was with now.

And in these wonderings, he saw the front door of her apartment opening to
afford a view of bookshelves and cream coloured couches and a neglected,
small-screen TV. He would have to push himself — though not too hard,
lest the effort break the spell — to update TC’s taste. It was too
easy to put her in a grad student’s digs, as if she had stayed frozen in their
Columbia winter romance. He wanted to imagine his former girlfriend as she
would be now.

He had done a good job. The room was less bohemian than the studio where he
had seen TC the previous night. Much of the furniture was vaguely ethnic
— dark wood tables that Will guessed were from India or Thailand; a pair
of Moroccan window-shutters in distressed blue wood, not attached to a window
but hung on the wall, like a painting. Mementos, Will guessed, from some
serious travelling: TC had been a fearless explorer, even when he knew her.

Still, there were no incense sticks, no batiks flung over couches. Instead
the place was uncluttered, almost minimalist in its preference for clean space.
He knew that TC had been reluctant to let him in here, but when Will phoned
from outside the
Times
office, she explained that she had grown tired of
cafe-hopping. She needed to shower, to sleep in her own bed — and to hell
with the risk. Will, who had earlier fired off a text accusing YY of ‘horseshit
games,’ knew exactly how she felt. He simply asked for her address and
said he would come straight over. He reckoned it was easier on both of them if
she had no chance to say no.

When he came in, she tried to pretend it was no big deal.

There was no ceremonial flinging open of the front door, no tour of the
apartment. Instead, she let him find her kneeling on the floor in the main room
surrounded by yellow Post-it notes. On each one was written a biblical verse.
Will recognized them: Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs.

TC was in the middle of them, her sketchbook on her lap, surveying the
pattern she had arranged. He crouched down to look at the ink-covered page, and
at the Post-its arranged around the hardwood floor, and felt sudden powerful
surge — gratitude for this woman who was offering not only emotional
sustenance but a razor-sharp intellect. He felt as if she was saving him.

In a gesture that was almost involuntary, he reached out to touch the back
of TC’s neck, so that his palm touched her skin and his knuckles brushed
against her hair. Her head was down, as if she was a coy schoolgirl receiving a
prize but now it came up to meet his gaze. Again without conscious thought, a
pulse of energy went through Will’s hand, pressing slightly on TC’s
neck as if to bring her closer towards him.

She moved and he moved and now their lips were touching in the lightest of
kisses. He could smell her skin, an aroma that made his muscles weaken and his
blood race at the same time. It was a familiar feeling, one he had known with TC
a thousand times before. His innards seemed to melt, even as his loins hardened.

She stopped suddenly, gripping his arm with an urgency he knew was not lust.
Her mouth was away from his.

‘Shhh. What’s that?’

It was a metallic rattle, now repeated. It seemed to be coming from inside
the apartment. They froze, neither risking movement. Will saw his hand still
cupping the back of TC’s head, his fingers in her hair, and caught
himself. What the hell was he doing? Beth was a hostage in some God-forsaken jail
and he was making out with his ex-girlfriend on the floor of her apartment. The
shame seemed to congeal somewhere in his guts; he sickened himself.

He pulled his hand away and pushed back out of the embrace. He was
exhausted, he told himself, his spirits sunk.

It was a reflex, a cry for help, the act of a desperate man, a grasping for
human comfort; it was gratitude for all TC had done, it was the familiarity of
a former lover, it was a lapse, a moment of madness, the unhappy by-product of
a crisis.

All these explanations coursed through his mind and he knew they were all
true. But they would not convince anybody, least of all him.

TC tensed again, gripping Will’s arm tighter. The buzzing had
returned, a grinding, jangling sound. Was someone inside this flat, carrying an
electric saw, attempting to muffle it inside a blanket?

Will now leapt to his feet, striding over to the couch by the front door
where he had dumped his coat. He shoved his hand into the side pocket and held
up his phone for TC to see: set on silent, it had vibrated against his keys.

‘Damn, we missed a call.’

Will dialled his voicemail.
You have one new message
. His chest began
pounding. What if it was some vital clue? What if it was Beth herself, having
wriggled out of her chains and somehow crawled on hands and knees to a phone,
only for her husband’s number to ring out — because he was too busy
necking with his ex-girlfriend? Will appalled himself.

At last the message was playing.

‘Hey, big fella.’ It was Jay Newell. ‘Don’t know
what this is all about and my ass would be in the wringer if anyone knew I had
so much as farted in your direction, so this stays strictly in the vault, OK.
Capisce? All right, here is the news. Turns out the autopsy report on your
friend Howard Macrae found, cue drum roll, a “puncture on the right
thigh, consistent with” — get this — “a tranquillizer
dart”.’ Newell was beginning to chuckle. ‘Can you believe
that? A tranquillizer dart? Like they use to stun elephants in the zoo.
Apparently, they fire ‘em from some big safari gun. Anyway, blood tests confirm
the guy had a shitload of sedative in his system at ToD as well. Sorry, time of
death. I’m going native, Will! I’m talking like a cop! Help! OK,
hope that works for you. Give me a call, sometime. We should hook up. And send
love to your gorgeous wife from me.’

Will almost fell into the couch, as if knocked off his feet. He realized now
that he had never expected this theory of his to stack up; a Brownsville
hustler and a wing-nut from Montana were almost mathematical opposites. He had contacted
Newell to confirm that the deaths of Macrae and Baxter could not possibly be
linked. With that proved, he could start looking in more likely directions.

But Yosef Yitzhok had told him to look to his work and so he had. In the
lead up to Beth’s abduction, his work had consisted of two bizarre
stories at opposite ends of the continent. And yet now Will had proof that they
were connected. In life these two victims had both performed an unusually good
deed; in death, they had both been anaesthetized before the act of murder. The
method of sedation was radically different, just as the killings had been. But
it was too much of a coincidence.

Will began to feel elated. At last he had made progress; a hunch had been
vindicated. Somewhere in the events of the last week lay the key to Beth’s
kidnapping and, therefore, her freedom. He had come this far, all he had to do
was work out the rest. He was closing in.

Will jumped to his feet, about to stride over to TC and trumpet his
breakthrough. Instead he halted after two paces. First, he was hit anew by the
memory of a few minutes ago. Now, to add to the shame and self-disgust at his
betrayal of Beth, was embarrassment. He had made a pass at TC and both of them
would have to act as if it had never happened.

Then another thought struck him. It surely meant something that Baxter and
Macrae had been killed in a similar fashion, but what exactly? Just because
these two deaths were apparently related, what did that have to do with Beth’s
kidnap? Baxter and Macrae might have lived thousands of miles from each other,
but they both lived in different worlds from Beth — and from the Hassidim
for that matter. So YY had told him to look to his work, but what possible
connection between these three events could there be?

As he began to pace around the room he wondered: could his stories have
served as a trigger for the Hassidim to take Beth? She had gone missing on
Friday morning, just as his Baxter story had appeared in print. Could something
in that story have set off the plot to kidnap his wife? Was there something in
the combination of the two, Baxter and Macrae, that spurred the Hassidim to
abduct Beth?

Will spooled back to last night in Crown Heights. His story on Baxter had
been marked and laid out in the room where he had been interrogated. The
Hassidim had been discussing it. It was not the by-line that interested them:
they already knew he was a reporter for the
Times
. They had emailed him at
the
Times
address. No, it was the story itself. Or, thought Will for the
first time, the stories.

He reached for his cell phone, finding the inbox of messages and scrolling
through the batch from YY. He counted ten, making sure he got past the latest
riddles. There it was.

Decoded, it read : 2 down: More’s to cone.

At the time, both he and TC thought it was a mere confirmation message. Like
one of those computer games:
Well done, you have reached level 2, the Castle
of Doom. Next, prepare to enter the Sanctum of Fire
…

Now Will saw it differently. ‘2 down’ referred to Macrae and
Baxter. But who were the rest?

H
e used to come here when it
was all-white. This beach, with its gentle curve of fair sand, was one of his
favourite spots. When he was a student, he would come to ogle the girls and drink
beers by the crateload. Back in those days, outsiders thought his country was
in flames, consumed by a race war. But it did not feel like that; at least not
to him. He was white and well-off and having the time of his life. He knew a
couple of guys who had signed a petition, but otherwise politics did not
intrude. Besides, as an Afrikaaner who had grown up in the rural heartland of
the Transvaal, he was raised to believe the separation of the races, apartheid,
was not offensive but natural. On the farm, rabbits and cows had their own
places and did not mix, so why should blacks and whites be any different?

Now the beach looked as beautiful as ever, the water glittering in the
moonlight. As he faced the Atlantic Ocean, he could hear the buzz of the bars
behind him: a more mixed crowd now, black, white and what he had grown up
calling coloured. He tried to tune out the noise; he wanted to listen to his
own thoughts.

Was he elated by what he had just done? He was not sure. Relieved,
certainly. He had been planning this moment for months. Each day, taking a
different document home — sometimes a diagram, sometimes a string of
algebraic numbers until he had built up the full set.

He breathed out heavily. He remembered those years at university, followed
by more years in graduate school, most of them spent in a lab. He had become a
research pharmacologist by the time he was twenty-seven and had spent the next
fifteen years working on a single project, codenamed Operation Help. It was his
boss’s little joke, playing on ‘help’ as a synonym. For Andre
van Zyl belonged to a team searching for a cure for AIDS.

They were just a part of it, of course. The headquarters of the research
effort was in New York, with satellite teams in Paris and Geneva. The South Africa
field office was smaller still, chosen for what the corporate literature called
its ‘clinical resonance’. Translation: South Africa had a handy
supply of AIDS sufferers.

They had been testing out new remedies on groups for years now. Andre had
been at some of the trials, clinics out in the sticks taking one hundred sick
men and women, marking fifty of them as a control group and handing new tablets
to the rest. Andre had been at his computer when the results came through. Time
after time his reports had had the same conclusion:
no impact; statistically
negligible results; needs further work
.

But nine months ago, a set of data had come back that could not be ignored.
The sample group had shown an improvement unlike any seen before. The symptoms
were not just held at bay; they were becoming non-existent. The medication
seemed not only to pacify the virus, but to chase it out of the system
altogether.

Within a week, scientists from the Geneva team had flown in to see the
patients for themselves. A few days later the head of the entire project
arrived from New York. He ordered the control group be put onto the new drugs
immediately, on ‘humanitarian grounds’.

Andre had to laugh at that. For he knew what would happen next. The head
honcho from America would publish a paper in Nature, hailing his breakthrough
and bidding for the Nobel prize that was surely his, while the US Food and Drug
Administration would start testing the new tablet. Once they had given the seal
of approval, it would go on sale and make the company they all worked for one
of the richest in the world. They had found the holy grail of twenty-first century
medicine: they had found a cure for AIDS.