The Righteous Men (2006) (40 page)

‘So who do you think did it, then? Eh? If you didn’t kill that
man, who did?’

‘I don’t know. Which should worry you infinitely more. It suggests
that whoever is behind this dreadful scheme is now aware of you.’

‘Rabbi Freilich, I think you have to tell us what’s going on.’
TC was sounding like Tova Chaya again. ‘You know things, we know things.
We all know time is running out. It is already the Day of Judgment. Whoever is
doing this wants to finish the job before the Ten Days of Penitence are over. We
don’t have time to fight each other. So far, handling this alone, what
have you done? Have you stopped the killing?’

The rabbi had his head bowed, his right palm flat on his forehead. It moved
up onto his scalp, tucking under his yarmulke, and back down again. Whatever TC
was saying, it was striking a nerve. The man looked weighed down with worry. He
muttered a barely audible ‘no’.

TC sat forward, trying to close the deal. ‘The killing is still going
on. In twenty-four hours they might have killed the last of the
lamadvavniks
.
And who knows what will happen then. You can’t do this alone. We can help
you and you have to help us. You must do it. For the sake of HaShem.’

For the sake of the Name, for the sake of God himself. It was the ultimate
argument, the one no believer could refuse. Was TC deploying it because she
knew which buttons to press? Or was Tova Chaya speaking sincerely, genuinely fearing
for the sake of the world if they did not act? Will was not sure. But if he had
to guess one way or the other he would, to his great surprise, declare for the
latter. For all her scepticism, for all her ten years away from Crown Heights,
for all her bacon breakfasts and body piercings, she was not acting merely to
find Will’s wife, nor even for the sake of the remaining righteous men.
At that moment Will realized that TC was driven by nothing less than fear for the
fate of the world.

‘Tova Chaya, we have so little time.’ Rabbi Freilich was looking
up. He had removed his glasses, revealing a face etched in anguish. ‘We
have tried everything. I don’t know what more there is you can do. But I
will tell you what we know.’

Unexpectedly, he rose to his feet and made for the front door. He put on his
trilby and his coat and, without another word, gestured for TC and Will to
follow him.

Outside was a quiet Will had never experienced in a city. The streets were
desolate. No cars travelled because the Yom Kippur restrictions prohibited all
driving. A few knots of young men walked together, wearing their prayer shawls.
Even though the evening was warm and people were out together, the atmosphere
was not festive. Instead Crown Heights seemed to be under a blanket of
contemplation and silent thought; it was as if the whole neighbourhood was a
single, roofless synagogue. Will felt grateful for his costume, so that he
could move through this extraordinary atmosphere without breaking the spell.

They were, Will now understood, moving towards the synagogue. Once again, he
wondered if he and TC were walking voluntarily into the wolf’s lair
— with the wolf as their guide.

But they did not go inside the main entrance. Instead they entered a
building next door, one that seemed entirely out of place in this
neighbourhood. It looked like a redbrick annexe to an Oxford college, ancient
by New York standards. Outside were crowds of men, spilling out from the lobby.
They did not have to wade through the throng: people stepped out of the way the
moment they recognized the rabbi. Will could see some raised eyebrows. He
assumed they were directed at him, a face they did not know. But when he saw TC
looking down at her feet, he understood: they were shocked to see a woman in
this usually male terrain.

TC managed to whisper an explanation. They were entering the Rebbe’s
house. This was the home the late leader had lived in and which had doubled as
his office.

Will stared. He had been here before, forty-eight hours earlier.

Soon they had reached a staircase. The crowds were thinning now. They moved
up another flight, to a corridor empty of people.
Straight into his trap
,
thought Will.

Rabbi Freilich led them through one door, which revealed another. But he did
not go in. Instead he turned around, to offer an explanation to TC.

‘I want you to know that what you are about to see is a mark of our
desperation. It is a violation of Yom Kippur that has never before occurred in
this building and, please God, will never happen again. We are doing it for—’

‘
Pikuach nefesh
.’ TC had interrupted him. ‘I know.
It is a matter of saving lives.’

The rabbi nodded, grateful to TC for her understanding.

Then he turned around, breathing in sharply through his nostrils as if
bracing himself for the secret he was about to reveal. Only then did Rabbi
Freilich dare open the door.

T
his place, Will realized,
would normally be still on such a holy evening: no lights on, no machines in
use, no phones answered, no eating, no drinking. Even Will could tell that the
scene before him was an act of mass sacrilege.

It looked like the control room of a police station. Perhaps a dozen people
at computers, surrounded by in-trays spilling over with paper and, on a back
wall, a large wipe-board, covered with names, phone numbers, addresses. Down
one side, Will could see a list of names. In a quick scan, he spotted Howard
Macrae and Gavin Curtis — a line through each of them.

‘No one knows about this room apart from the men working in it —
and now you. We have been working in here day and night for a week. And today
we lost the man who knew it best, the man who set it up.’

‘Yosef Yitzhok,’ said Will, noticing a pile of maps — one
of them for Montana — and a stack of guide books, for London, for
Copenhagen, for Algiers.

‘All of this was his work. And today he was murdered.’

‘Rabbi Freilich?’ It was TC. ‘Do you think you could start
at the beginning?’

The rabbi led them to the front of the room, where a desk had been set out
as if for a teacher to invigilate an exam.

The three of them sat around it.

‘As you know, the Rebbe in his later years spoke often about
Moshiach
,
about the Messiah. He gave long talks at our weekly
farbrengen
touching
on this theme. Tova Chaya will also know how we preserved those talks for
posterity.’

TC took her cue. ‘Because he spoke on the sabbath, the Rebbe could not
be tape-recorded or filmed. That’s not allowed. So we relied on an
ancient system. In the synagogue would be three or four people chosen for their
amazing memories. They would stand just a few yards away from the Rebbe, usually
with their eyes closed, listening to every word, memorizing what he said. Then,
the minute the sabbath was over they would gather together and kind of spew out
their memories, while one of them would scribble it all down. They would get it
out of their heads as quickly as they could. While they were doing it, they
would check what they remembered against each other, adding a word here,
correcting a word there. I can still picture it: these guys were incredible.
They could listen to a three-hour speech by the Rebbe and recite it off by
heart. They were called
choyzers
, literally “returners”. The
Rebbe would say it, they would play it back. They were human tape recorders.’

‘And, Tova Chaya, do you remember who was the most brilliant
choyzer
of them all?’

TC’s eyes suddenly widened, as a long-buried memory came back. ‘But
he was just a boy.’

‘It’s true. But he became a
choyzer
soon after he had
reached the age of Bar Mitzvah. He was just thirteen when he began relaying the
words of the Rebbe. He had a special gift.’ Freilich faced Will. ‘We
are speaking about Yosef Yitzhok.’

‘He could memorize whole speeches, just like that?’

‘He always said he could not memorize whole speeches. Only the words
of the Rebbe. When the Rebbe spoke, he would make himself, his own thoughts,
disappear. He would try to insert himself into the mind of the Rebbe, to become
an extension of him. That was his technique. No one else could do it the way he
could. The Rebbe had a special affection for him.’ Rabbi Freilich rolled
back into his seat, his eyes closed. Will could only guess, but this grief
looked genuine.

‘As I said, in the last few years, the Rebbe began to speak more and
more about
Moshiach
. Telling us to prepare for the coming of Messiah,
reminding us that Messiah was a central belief in Judaism. That it was not some
abstract, remote point of theology but that it was real. He wanted us to
believe it, that
Moshiach
could be with us in the here and now.

‘No one knew this teaching of the Rebbe’s better than Yosef Yitzhok.
He heard it week after week. But it was more than hearing. It was absorbing. He
was ingesting this material, taking it into himself. And then, in the last days
of the Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhok — who was a brilliant scholar in his own
right noticed something.

‘He thought back to all the talks the Rebbe had given on the theme of
the Messianic age and he discerned a pattern.

Very often the Rebbe would quote a
pasuk
—’

‘A verse.’

‘Thank you, Tova Chaya. Yes, the Rebbe would quote a verse from
Deuteronomy.
Tzedek, tzedek tirdof
.’

‘Justice, justice shall you pursue,’ TC murmured.

‘The English translation the books give is, “Follow justice and
justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is
giving you”. But it was that word, tzedek, that caught Yosef Yitzhok’s
attention. To use it so often, and always in the same context. It was as if the
Rebbe was reminding us of something.’

‘He wanted you to remember the
tzaddikim
. The righteous men.’

‘That’s what Yosef Yitzhok thought. So he went back through the
texts, examining them intensely. And that’s how he saw something else,
something even more intriguing.’

Will leaned forward, his eyes boring into the rabbi’s.

In close proximity to the quotation —
tzedek, tzedek tirdof
—
he would offer another quotation. Not the same one every time, but from the
same two sources. Either he would cite the Book of Proverbs—’

‘Chapter ten?’

‘Yes, Mr Monroe. Chapter ten. That’s right. You knew all this
already?’

‘Think of it as an informed guess. Don’t let me interrupt you;
please, continue.’

‘Well, as you say, the Rebbe would either quote a verse from Proverbs,
Chapter 10, or he would quote from the prophets. Specifically, Isaiah, Chapter
30. Now that got Yosef Yitzhok very excited. Because kabbalists know one
important thing about Isaiah, Chapter 30, Verse 18. It ends with the word
lo
,
the Hebrew for “for him”. The full phrase is “blessed are all
they who wait for Him”. But the real significance of the word—’

‘—is the way it is spelled.’

‘Tova Chaya has beaten me to it. The word lo is made up of two
characters, Mr Monroe. Lamad and vav. It spells thirty six. Now the Rebbe was a
careful speaker. He did not say things by accident. He did not pull quotations
out of the air. Yosef Yitzhok was convinced there was a deliberate intent.’

‘So he went through every transcript. And, sure enough, the Rebbe
spoke of
tzedek
, followed immediately by a verse from one of those two
chapters, thirty-five times. By that method, he left us with thirty-five
different verses.’

‘But—’

‘I know what you’re thinking, Mr Monroe, and you are right.
There are thirty-six righteous men. We’ll come to that. For the moment,
Yosef Yitzhok has thirty-five verses, staring at him from the page. He wonders
what they could mean. And then he remembers the stories that children like him and
like you, Tova Chaya, were raised on. Stories of the founder of Hassidism, the
Baal Shem Tov; stories of Rabbi Leib Sorres.’

Then of such greatness, they were privileged to know the whereabouts of the
righteous men.’ Will looked at Tova Chaya as she spoke: she had, he was
sure, worked it all out.

‘Exactly. Few men knew the mind of the Rebbe as intimately as Yosef
Yitzhok, and he also knew the Rebbe’s worth. He knew that he was one of
the great men of Hassidic history. Some of the very greatest had been let in on
this divine secret. It was not absurd to imagine the Rebbe would be one of them.’

‘So Yosef Yitzhok reckoned the Rebbe knew who the thirty six were. And
he goes further: he thinks these thirty-five verses he quoted are clues to
their identity?’

‘Exactly, Will. Yosef Yitzhok has this thought in the very closing
days of the Rebbe’s life, when the Rebbe is too ill to answer any
questions. He can barely speak.’

‘So what does he do?’

‘He stares at the thirty-five verses for days on end. He is sure the
Rebbe wants them to be understood, that he is passing this information on for a
reason. So he is determined to break them open, so to speak, to find out what
is inside. He looks at them from every angle. He translates the letters into numeric
values; he adds; he multiplies. He reproduces them as anagrams. But of course
there is a logical problem.

‘How could the identities of the righteous men be contained in those
verses? The identities change in every generation. Yet the verses stay
stubbornly the same. Even if, say, verse twenty included the name of
tzaddik
number twenty for this year, where would we find the name of
tzaddik
number twenty for the year 2020 or 2050 or, in the past, 1950 and 1850? How
could the names of men who are alive today be concealed in a text that remains
static?’

‘And that’s when Yosef Yitzhok’s remarkable powers truly shone
through. He remembered the answer.’