The Righteous Men (2006) (39 page)

So he jumped when he saw the door to Mr Clark’s room creak open. The
woman who came in had her finger to her lips, hushing Djalu. Her eyes were
smiling, as if she were planning on giving Mr Clark a surprise and did not want
Djalu to ruin it.

‘Good evening, Djalu.’

‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t realize you were working tonight.’

‘Well, you know death. It never sleeps.’

Djalu leapt to his feet. ‘Did someone die tonight?’

‘Not yet. But I expect it.’

‘Who? Maybe I should—’

‘Djalu, don’t get excited. OK?’ Calmly, the woman bent down
and pulled out several of the CDs in the bedside cabinet, letting them fall to
the floor.

‘Hey, miss. That’s Mr Clark’s music. I’m looking
after it—’

‘Here it is.’ She had reached behind the discs for what looked
like a bandage. Now she lay it on the bed, on the square of mattress next to Mr
Clark’s chest, which was rising and falling like a set of bellows. The
old man was fast asleep.

She opened up the bandage, pulling one flap of material to the left, the
other to the right, to reveal a hypodermic needle alongside a vial of clear
serum.

‘Is the doctor coming? No one told me.’

‘No, the doctor is not coming.’ She snapped on a pair of latex
gloves.

‘You giving Mr Clark a shot? What you doing?’

‘I’ll show you if you like. Come closer.’

‘Don’t hurt him.’

‘Relax, Djalu. Now come over here and you can see. A bit closer.’

The woman held the needle up to the window, where it made a silhouette
against the moonlight. ‘Now, Djalu, if you can place your hands on Mr
Clark’s shoulders. That’s it, just bend slightly.’

Cleanly, the woman jabbed the needle into Djalu’s neck, her thumb
pushing the plunger hard, sending the drug swimming into his veins within an
instant. Djalu had a second to turn around, his face frozen in astonishment. A
second later, he fell forward, landing heavily on Mr Clark’s heaving
chest.

His killer had to use all her strength to haul Djalu off and lay him
smoothly on the floor. She laid a blanket over him, stopping only to close his
eyes with the palm of her hand.

‘I apologize, Djalu Banggala, for what I have done. But I have done it
in the name of the Lord God Almighty. Amen.’

She packed the needle and the empty vial back into the bandage, tucked it
into her pocket and headed out, noiselessly. Mr Clark did not stir. If he heard
anything, it was only music — the insistent strings of one of Schubert’s
most famous pieces.
Death and the Maiden
.

T
C was leading the way, fast
and determined. She was not to be diverted. She last walked these streets a
decade ago, but she had not forgotten where Rabbi Freilich lived.

Rushing to keep up, Will was firing out questions. But TC was staring
straight ahead. ‘They found the body a couple of hours ago. On the floor
of my apartment. Apparently no one realized he had gone missing till this
morning.’

‘Christ. How long do they think he’d been dead?’

‘Since last night. He was killed in my apartment, Will.’ TC’s
voice wavered for the first time.

Will thought of the super’s face: the Garry Kasparov of the basement.
If he had been killed last night, it could only have been minutes after he had
helped Will and TC escape. That was surely why he had been murdered. An image
jumped into Will’s mind.
The man in the baseball cap
.

First Yosef Yitzhok, now Pugachov. Two people who had come to Will’s
aid had paid for it with their lives. Who would be next? Rabbi Mandelbaum? Tom
Fontaine?

Ever since Friday morning Will had felt as if he was falling down a
mineshaft, getting further and further away from the light. He could see
nothing clearly. The rabbi had explained what was surely going on, but how on
earth did it involve him and Beth? What had they got to do with this mystical prophecy,
a kabbalistic legend which now appeared to be fuelling an international killing
spree? He was falling and falling.

And just when he thought he had hit rock bottom — hearing of the
killing in Bangkok or of YY’s death — he would fall some more. Now
Pugachov was dead and TC was in dire trouble.

‘Janey says the police knocked on every door, asking after the
occupant of Apartment 7. Thank God she was in. She told them my name and said
she hadn’t seen me since yesterday afternoon, which is good. Luckily, she
was smart enough to say she didn’t know my cell number. They just left
and she phoned me right away, to give me a heads-up.’

‘And they definitely regard you as the suspect?’

‘Janey says she got that impression. Why else was the guy in my
apartment? Like, he went in there alive and now he’s dead. I’m
gone. What else does it look like?’

TC was still striding forward, her breath forming instant clouds. Her cheeks
were beginning to glow. ‘Apparently, they asked lots of weird questions.’

‘What kind of weird questions?’

‘About me and Pugachov. Did we have a sexual relationship?

Was he obsessed with me? Was he a stalker?’

Now Will understood what the police were thinking.

Pugachov, the psycho super, gets himself into TC’s apartment after
midnight. Tries to rape her. TC reaches for her gun, kills him and flees the
scene.

‘It won’t take long for them to get your cell number. The police
must have access to all that.’

‘Hence this.’ TC held up the carcass of a cell phone, minus its
battery. Once the police had her number, they would doubtless be able to track
it. Will had covered a couple of investigations where detectives reconstructed
someone’s movements using phone records. These not only revealed the
numbers the suspect had dialled, but each time they had come within range of a
transmitter. Police could draw a map showing where someone had been and when.
Unless the phone was completely without power: no signal, no trace.

‘When did you last have it on?’

‘Mandelbaum’s.’

‘It won’t take them long to get there. Will he talk?’

TC slowed down and turned her eyes to meet Will’s. ‘I don’t
know.’

They had come to Rabbi Freilich’s house, no grander than any of the
others in Crown Street. The paint was peeling on the front door, but that was
not what Will noticed. Rather it was the bumper sticker that had been placed
just above eye level:
Moshiach is coming
.

If these were student digs, it would not have looked incongruous.

But this was the home of a grown-up, a man of standing. The sticker sent a
tremor through Will. It said one thing: fanatic.

TC had already knocked on the door and now Will could hear movement. Through
the opaque glass, he could see the outline of a man’s head and shoulders.

‘Ver is? Vi haistu?’

Yiddish, Will imagined.

‘S’is Tova Chaya Lieberman, Reb Freilich
. I’ve come
because of the great
sakono.’

‘Vos heyst?’
What do you mean?

‘Reb Freilich, a sakono fur die gantseh breeye.’
The same
warning she had given Rabbi Mandelbaum:
a threat to all creation
.

The door opened, to reveal the man Will had talked to at some length but had
never seen. He was neither tall, nor physically commanding but his face had
stern, firm features which, Will could see, conveyed a quiet authority. His
beard was brown rather than white or grey and it was short and well-kempt. He
wore neat, rimless glasses. In a different context, Will could see him as the CEO
of a moderate-sized American company. As he saw and recognized Will, he hesitated,
then gave a dip of the head, a gesture Will chose to interpret as contrition.

‘You’d better come inside.’

They were ushered once again around a dining table white tablecloth, plastic
sheet — in a room filled with holy books. This room, though, was large,
airy and tidy. In a corner, Will spotted a pile of editions of The
New York
Times
. He could also see a magazine rack stuffed with the
Atlantic Monthly
,
The
New Republic
and a variety of Hebrew newspapers. Making the instant
assessment that was part of his trade, Will wrote a four-word headline in his
head to describe Rabbi Freilich:
Man of the World
.

‘Rabbi, you know Will Monroe.’

‘We’ve met.’

‘I know how strange this must seem, Rabbi Freilich, me turning up like
this after all these years. I promise you, I never thought I’d come back,
truly I didn’t. But Will is an old friend of mine. And he asked for my
help when his wife went missing. He didn’t know about my … my
background.’

She paused, to collect herself. ‘But now we know what’s going
on. We’ve pieced it together. It’s taken some time and it’s
not been easy but we are certain.’

Rabbi Freilich held TC’s gaze and said nothing.

‘Good men are dying. First it was Howard Macrae in Brownsville, then
Pat Baxter in Montana. Then Samak Sangsuk in Bangkok. And now this British
politician. Someone is killing the
lamadvavniks
, aren’t they,
Rabbi? Someone is killing the righteous of the earth.’

‘Yes, Tova Chaya. I’m afraid they are.’

Will drew breath, a tiny gasp. He had expected a battle with Freilich, a
round of game-playing as the rabbi played dumb, forcing TC and Will to produce
all their evidence. But he was denying nothing. A dread thought surfaced. What
if the rabbi had already realized that these two had indeed exposed his
murderous plot and had therefore decided there was no alternative but to
silence them? They would have walked straight into his hands! No need for the
man in the baseball cap, Pugachov’s killer: Will and TC had done his job for
them. How could they have been so stupid? They had not even planned a strategy
for this encounter. TC had just stormed over there …

‘A plot is indeed underway to murder the thirty-six hidden just men.
For some reason, this plot is taking place now, during the Ten Days of
Penitence — the holiest time of the year. The killing started on Rosh
Hashana and it has not stopped. Whoever is behind this must have decided that
these are the judgment days, that a righteous man murdered in this period will
not be instantly replaced by the birth of another. Perhaps they have seen
something in our texts we never saw, the existence of a kind of limbo period
between the New Year, when people are inscribed in the Book of Life, and the
Day of Atonement, when the Book of Life is sealed. During these ten days maybe
the world is especially vulnerable. Whatever their reasoning, they have set out
to kill the
lamad vav
and they seem determined to do it by sunset tomorrow,
by the end of Yom Kippur.’ He faltered. ‘I didn’t think
anyone else would find out.’ He turned towards Will, though not quite
meeting his eyes. ‘Tova Chaya was always an exceptional student. And you,
you have shown admirable persistence.’

Thanks for nothing
, thought Will.

‘We have known about it only for a few days. But I tremble for the
world at the very thought of it. Some will say this is only a legend, only a
fairy story. But it has deep roots, ones that go back to
Avraham Avinu
,
to Abraham our father. It has endured for millennia. Whoever is doing this is
gambling that the story is just a story. That it is not a true statement about the
way the world has worked since the beginning of time.

But what if they are wrong? They are testing this idea to destruction. It
will be the destruction of everything.’ The rabbi was drumming his
fingers on the table. If he was faking anxiety, thought Will, he was doing a
very good job.

‘You keep saying
they
,’ Will said suddenly, his
confidence taking even himself aback. ‘But I’m not sure there is a
they
.
I think there’s a
you
.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I think you do, Rabbi Freilich. So far there are no suspects in
any of these cases, except you and your, your… followers.’ He knew
it was the wrong word. The only leader these people followed was the man whose
photograph hung on every wall. And he was dead. ‘You more or less
admitted killing Samak Sangsuk to me.’ The muscle around the rabbi’s
left eye gave a slight twitch. ‘And I know you are holding my wife,
though what she has to do with any of this still no one has explained to me.’
On those last words, he had raised his voice, betraying an anger he could not
conceal. He stopped, to bring himself back under control. ‘The only
people we know have been engaged in criminal activity are you and the people
who work with you.’

‘I can see how it looks.’

‘So can I. And I’m sure the police, who have you in their sights
already, would get the picture very quickly if they knew half of what we know.
I don’t think I need to mention Mr Pugachov, the super at TC’s,
sorry, Tova Chaya’s, building, do I? Killed last night by that goon in a
baseball cap you had chasing us?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, come on. We really can’t play these games much longer,
Rabbi. Don’t you see? We know what’s going on.’

‘Will, that’s enough.’ It was TC, speaking in her normal
accent.

‘I have no idea about any Mr Pugachov. And I know nothing of any man
in a baseball cap.’

‘I don’t believe this. This is ridiculous! You sent a man to follow
me yesterday. We saw him, we got away and the man who helped us is now lying
dead in her apartment.’ He could hardly bring himself to use the name
Tova Chaya again. It sounded strange enough the first time.

‘Will, please.’ TC was imploring him to stop. But he could not
help himself. The pressure of the last few days had been coiled up for too long.

The rabbi’s face was tensing. ‘I promise you, I know of no man
in a baseball cap. I did not send anyone to follow you. I have not lied to you.
Not once. When you confronted me about the man in Bangkok, I did not deny it. I
told you that a terrible mistake had occurred. When we,’ he paused for
the right word, ‘met on erev
shabbos
— excuse me — when
we met on Friday night, I even conceded that we are indeed holding your wife. I
have not lied. And I am telling you the truth now: what you tell me happened in
Tova Chaya’s building was nothing to do with me.’