The Righteous Men (2006) (42 page)

‘I’m afraid we didn’t know about that until days after it happened.
When the news about the others started coming through. Was it even in the
papers?’

‘Yes,’ said Will, pushing the air out of his nostrils in a sound
of wry resignation. ‘It was in the papers.’ That was the trouble with
page B3 of Metro; people could sail right past it.

‘Anyway, it was the high holy days. We were not reading the
newspapers. We were living our lives. We had no idea anything was happening.
But then some of our people started hearing things. Our emissary in Seattle saw
the cabin he had visited on the television news. The man who runs our centre in
Chennai was reading through the local paper when he saw that the
tzaddik
in that town — one of our youngest — had been found dead. One
report after another.’

‘How many have gone?’

‘We don’t know. Remember, Yosef Yitzhok only began working on
this a few months ago. Our list was barely complete; we hadn’t been able
to confirm everyone. This man, for example—’ the rabbi gestured
back towards the wipe-board with the Chancellor’s number on it ‘—it
took us a long time to find him. It turns out the GPS system is slightly different
there, in England; it takes a different key. The WGS84 datum, apparently. We
didn’t know that then, so when Yosef Yitzhok first ran the numbers, they
indicated, of all things, a prison. A Belmarsh jail. It seemed unlikely. But we
didn’t dismiss such a possibility. We know the
tzaddikim
delight
in concealing their true nature.

‘But when we readjusted the figures the result was instant. Downing
Street! And not the famous house, Number Ten. But the house next door. The map
was very clear. At the time, this man, Curtis, was in some trouble. A scandal,
I think. Another disguise.’

Will was getting impatient. Enough lectures, he thought. He wanted simple,
hard facts — stripped of their mystical overtones. ‘So, sorry, I
just want to be clear on this. Do you have the full list or not?’

‘We think we do.’

‘And of those, how many are dead?’

‘We think at least thirty-three.’

‘Jesus!’

‘You mean, they may only have to kill three more people? It’s
nearly midnight now. Yom Kippur ends in about nineteen hours!’ TC,
usually so calm, sounded genuinely panicked.

‘Rabbi, whoever’s doing this seems to be pretty clued up on
Jewish religious custom, wouldn’t you say?’ Will began. ‘I
mean, who else but religious Jews know all this stuff about the righteous men,
about the Days of Awe? They’re following it all to the letter. And you
say that no one outside this very small group even knew of Yosef Yitzhok’s
discovery.’

‘What are you saying, Mr Monroe?’

‘I’m saying, Rabbi, that you may not be behind this, despite the
fact that I know you’re a proven kidnapper. But somebody inside this …
organization or community or whatever it is, almost certainly is. I reckon this
is what the police would call an inside job. If I were you, I’d start
looking at the people here very closely.’

‘Mr Monroe, it’s late and time is running out. I don’t
have the time or the strength to start fighting you. What Tova Chaya said
before is right: we need to work together. So I’m going to trust you,
even if you cannot trust me. I’m going to let you do something that will
prove we are not behind this terrible wickedness.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’m going to send you to the next victim.’

W
ill had been to the Lower
East Side a few times, to visit friends chic and savvy enough to buy up and
renovate properties in the now-gentrified pockets north of East Broadway. He
had seen the old-time delis, drunk coffee in the retro-chic cafes on Orchard
Street. But he had not wandered beyond the safely fashionable areas. He had
glided past the old tenement buildings, seeing them as cinematic backdrop. He
had never looked properly.

Now he was among them, shivering from cold and exhaustion in the night air.
Scrunched in his hand, safely hidden inside his pocket, was the scrap of paper
with the address he was meant to find.

Rabbi Freilich had led Will and TC back to the computer whiz who had given
them the earlier demonstration. He talked them through the process. First, feed
the computer the Hebrew sentence: Verse 16 of Isaiah 30. Then ask it to stop at
the right intervals, and it will spit out a number. Feed that number through
the GPS websites and you get co-ordinates for a place: a specific address on a
specific street on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

‘Hang on a minute,’ Will had said. ‘Isn’t this a bit
unlikely?

You’ve got thirty-six righteous men out of six billion people on the
planet — and two are in New York? Howard Macrae and now this guy? It
sounds a bit convenient to me.’ It had not yet congealed into a full
allegation, but Will’s scepticism was turning into suspicion.

The rabbi explained that they too had wondered at such a coincidence. But
then they had read deeper into Hassidic folklore. It turned out a truly great
tzaddik
radiated a ‘glow’ — the same word Rabbi Mandelbaum had used
— that might draw in others. Their calculated guess was that the Rebbe’s
goodness had been so powerful that a couple of
tzaddikim
had been pulled
near. Think of them as satellites,’ the rabbi had said.

But there was a problem. The address now balled up in Will’s fist was
an apartment building, home to dozens of people. Which one was the
tzaddik
?
The Hassidim had gone down there once to check it out soon after Yosef Yitzhok
had first cracked the Rebbe’s code, but they had not been able to identify
him. The man in this building remained one of the most hidden of the hidden
righteous men.

‘You will have a better chance of finding him than us,’

Freilich had said.

‘Why?’

‘Look at us, Mr Monroe. We cannot go where you go, we cannot ask what
you can ask. We are too visible. You are a reporter from The
New York Times
.
You can go where you like and talk to anybody. You found Mr Macrae,
zechuso
yogen aleinu
, and Mr Baxter,
zechuso yogen aleinu
.’ May his
righteousness protect us. ‘Find this man. Go find our
tzaddik
.’

So shortly before midnight, Will took off his skullcap and went back out
into the world. As he set off, TC decided to do the same.

‘I’m going to call the police. I can’t hide from them
forever.

We’ve done what we needed to do.’

‘What will you say?’

‘That my phone’s been dead all day and I’ve only just
heard what happened. Wish me luck. Or at least visit me in jail.’

‘This is so not a joke.’

‘I know. But you can see what it looks like: a dead man in my
apartment and I’m AWOL. I might be charged with murder by the morning.’

‘This is all my fault. I sucked you into this insane mess.’

‘No, you didn’t. You asked for my help. I could have said no. I
knew what I was getting into.’

‘Did you?’

‘Not really, no.’

And with that, Will leaned over to give TC a kiss on the cheek — only
for her to pull back the moment he came close. There was a magnetic field of
resistance around her face. Of course. She was not allowed to touch a man, let
alone be kissed by one, not in the heart of Crown Heights. Will made do with a
plain goodbye.

Now watching his breath form clouds before him, Will turned the corner so
that he was at Montgomery and Henry.

Behind him was a small triangle of park. In front, the tenement building he
was looking for. He held back, wanting to gaze at it a while. He could see one,
two, three lights still on.

Now what? He had barely considered what he would do once he got here. He
could not exactly start knocking on doors, claiming to be doing a vox pop for
The
New York Times
after midnight. What could he do?

He would have to get into the building. That would be a start. Then he could
look at the mail boxes, get some names, Google a few of them on his BlackBerry.
He would think of something. ‘

Oh, good. Someone coming out
. Perfect: that would give him his chance
to slip in. Except this person was moving too fast, almost running. It was hard
to make him, or her, out; it was too dark and the light above the entrance too
dim. But when he stepped forward, looking nervously left and right, Will saw enough.

Most striking was the piercing brightness of his eyes, a chill, glassy blue.
But it was the posture Will recognized. A physical confidence, as if this man
was used to using his body. The clothes were slightly changed, but there was no
mistaking him — with or without his baseball cap.

W
ill’s first instinct
was to observe. He was used to watching, seeing how things unfolded. So it took
a beat and then another before Will realized that he could not just watch. He
would have to stalk the stalker.

He was wary. Hardly anyone was around; he would be noticed. So he kept far
back, walking as quietly as he could. He cursed the black leather shoes he was
wearing: they made too much noise. He tried to prevent his heels making contact
with the sidewalk, to dampen the sound.

But the man in front seemed to be in a hurry as he charged down Henry
Street. Not running, but a brisk walk that allowed no time for looking back.
That emboldened Will; he walked faster, taking pains to keep just less than a
block between them.

The stalker was carrying a black leather bag at his side, the strap worn
like a sash crossing over to his opposite shoulder. He was neat and
self-contained, moving nimbly. Will was no expert, but he would have been
surprised if this guy did not have some connection with the military.

By now he had crossed Clinton and Jefferson. Where was he going? To meet a
getaway car? If so, why had he not been picked up earlier? Maybe he was walking
towards a subway station. Will cursed his limited knowledge of New York: he had
no idea if there was a station near here.

Without warning, the man suddenly looked back. Will saw the movement of his
head and, without even thinking, moved off the sidewalk towards the steps of
the tenement block he was passing. At the same time he reached into his pocket
and pulled out his keys. What the stalker would have seen was a man entering
his own apartment building. He walked on; Will let out a deep sigh. He had been
holding his breath.

By now the man ahead was turning a sharp right. Will tried to position
himself so that he would not be caught in his field of vision.

‘Yo, Ashley! You got my phone?’

Will had not seen them coming, but there they were, right in front of him.
Three African-American teenage girls, filling up the sidewalk. Will tried to
slide past, but they were in the mood for some fun.

‘What’s the hurry, handsome? You don’t like how we look?

You don’t think we look fine?’ At this the other two were screeching
with laughter. He looked over their heads, to see the stalker heading down a
side street towards East Broadway.

He was hard to make out.

‘Yo, I’m over here, honey!’ It was the leader of the pack,
now waving her hand in Will’s face. If he had been born in New York, he
was sure he would have shoved them aside with a curt, ‘Get the fuck out
of my way.’ But even here, on a mission to prevent a murder in the dead
of night, he was still an Englishman.

‘Excuse me, I have to get past. Please.’

With that, he weaved around Ashley and company, hearing more whooping and
calling behind him. ‘My friend says you can have her number!’

Will now broke into a run, desperate to catch up. He reached the junction
and turned right, scanning the street up and down in search of his quarry.
There was a couple making out on a stoop. But no sign of the stalker.

He could see only two non-residential buildings; the man might have fled
into either one of them. He certainly could not yet have reached East Broadway
or else Will would have caught sight of him. Will slowed down, checking over
his shoulder, aware that this was exactly how to walk into an ambush. After
fifteen paces, Will gave up: he had clearly lost the man he had needed to
follow. He must have escaped into one of these two buildings, on opposite sides
of the street. Will was near enough now to see what they were. One was the
Church of the Reborn Jesus, but the other was a synagogue — affiliated to
the Hassidim of Crown Heights.

S
hould he try to break into
one or both of these places, to find the man he had followed? A true man of
action would do just that. But as he was sizing up the first building, a police
car sped past, lights flashing. He stepped back. That was all he needed: to be
arrested for breaking into a synagogue in the small hours of Monday morning.
And on Yom Kippur of all days. What believable grounds for following this man
did he even have? He had seen him come out of an apartment building on the
Lower East Side. Oh, and he had seen him out of TC’s window yesterday. He
had seen him commit no crime. As Harden would say, ‘You’ve got a
notebook full of nothing.’ Nothing except a grim suspicion that was
becoming firmer every minute.

He retraced his steps towards the building on Montgomery Street. He and
Rabbi Freilich had discussed what he should do in only the sketchiest terms. ‘Just
call me,’ the rabbi had said. ‘Even if you’re not sure it’s
him, call.’

‘And then what?’

‘We’ll come and we’ll help.’

Will was not quite sure what that meant.

He crossed the street and took a few furtive steps towards the entrance of
the tenement. A gleam of light drew his eye to the door-lock: it was not fully
shut! The stalker must have left it ajar, perhaps to avoid making even that
small noise.