The Righteous Men (2006) (44 page)

How funny to think that a matter of days ago the central force in his life
had been his career. His career! It was now in shreds: he had been caught
engaged in gross misconduct by the editor himself. And now he had lost all
standing in the eyes of the only man whose opinion really mattered: his father.
He saw that now with great clarity. Of course it was bound to have affected
him, growing up all those years without a dad. He felt it every day. Cricket
games, when other boys were getting cheered from the boundary. Sports days, when
he had no one to cheer in the fathers’ race. People used to ask if his
dad was dead.

He had gone through all the phases. He had been angry with his father; he
had resented him; he had, on occasion, joined forces with his mother in hating
him. But mainly he had missed him. He had missed the thing he had seen other boys
get every day from their fathers: a hand on the shoulder, a tousle of the hair,
a gesture that constituted male approval. Now, in this prison cell, unfogged by
ambiguity and nuance, he saw more starkly than ever before why he had crossed the
Atlantic and changed his life. He had come to seek his father’s approval.
It was not going to find him sitting in London; he would have to come to
America to get it for himself.

He had had a plan too. He would be the bright young man in a hurry, Will
Monroe, Oxford star, come to make a splash in New York City. He had imagined
the day, perhaps ten years from now, when he would wear black tie, lean into a
microphone positioned a few inches too low for a man of his height, and thank
the Pulitzer judges for their belief in him. This very week — on the
front page, twice — it had even seemed within reach. Yet now he was an
exhausted wreck. The woman he loved, and the future he dreamed of, had vanished.

Even as he engaged in this mental audit, he could feel a nagging intrusion
— one more thought demanding to break the surface. Will had been pushing
it below the waves more vigorously than the rest; he was hoping it would sink.

It forced itself up.
What if the Hassidim are right?
What if the moment
the thirty-six men are killed, the world is no longer upheld? Everything about
this wild theory had stacked up so far. The Chancellor really had performed an
act of stunning goodness. So had Baxter. And they were disguised just as Mandelbaum
said they would be. Could all the detail be right, but the idea itself be wrong?

Tonight he had witnessed, or just missed, the murder of a man who may well
have been a
tzaddik
, one of thirty-six righteous ones. If that’s
who this man was, then it would be one more confirmation that the Hassidim were
telling the truth — or at least part of it. It would also mean the
killers of the
lamad vav
were getting very close to their goal. He looked
at his watch: from what TC had told him, Yom Kippur would be over in about
sixteen hours. They had so little time.

He had to know: was the man in that building a
tzaddik
, as the
Hassidim had predicted? For the first time in hours, Will had an idea.

Some time later, the cell door opened again. Will braced himself to see his
father. But it was Fitzwalter.

‘Come with me.’

‘Where am I going?’

‘You’ll see.’

Will was led downstairs, into a room with bright fluorescent lights. There
were seven or eight other men there. At least three of them looked to be
stoned; he guessed several were homeless. The door was slammed shut.

‘OK, gentlemen,’ said a voice over a loud-speaker. ‘If you
can all take your places against the back wall.’ Two of the men in the
group seemed to know exactly what to do, casually walking to the back, then
standing and staring straight ahead. It was then Will saw the markings on the
wall, indicating height. This was a line-up, an identity parade.

On the other side of the one-way mirror Mrs Tina Perez of
the Greenstreet Mansions apartment building stared at the men arrayed before
her.

‘I know it’s been a long night, Mrs Perez,’ Fitzwalter was
saying. ‘So you just take your time. When you’re ready, I have two
questions to ask.’

‘I’m ready.’

‘I want you to look really hard and tell me whether you’ve seen
any of these men before and, if you have, where you’ve seen them. OK? Is
that clear?’

‘The answer’s no. I haven’t seen any of these men before. The
man I saw had eyes you couldn’t forget.’

‘You’re absolutely certain, Mrs Perez?’

‘I’m certain. He had his hands around poor Mr Bitensky’s neck
and he looked up at me with those eyes. Those terrible eyes—’

‘It’s OK, Mrs Perez. Please don’t distress yourself.
Jeannie, you can take Mrs Perez home now. Thank you.’

‘OK, show in Mrs Abdulla.’

***

Will was spared the encounter with his father he had
feared. Twenty minutes after the line-up, Fitzwalter had come into the cell.

‘More good news and bad news. The bad news for me is that two
witnesses say you were not the man they saw in Mr Bitensky’s apartment.
One of them did recognize you in the line-up. She places you at the apartment
building standing outside at the time of the killing. So the good news for you
is that I’m going to have to let you go. For now.’

There were forms to fill in, so that Will’s things could be released.
He pounced on his cell phone first, powering it up. Instantly it began
vibrating: a voice message. TC.

‘Hi, guess what. As predicted, I am in police custody. They’re questioning
me about the murder of Mr Pugachov. It seems he was shot, at point-blank range.
Can you believe this? In my apartment? That sweet, gentle man. And I can’t
bear to think it’s all because …What? Oh God, I’m sorry.
Sorry, Will, that’s Joel Brookstein. Do you remember him? He was at
Columbia. Anyway, he’s agreed to be my lawyer. He’s telling me to
shut my mouth. Let me know where you are and what’s happening. Not sure
if they’ll let me keep this phone on.’ Her voice faded, as if she
needed to talk over her shoulder. ‘All right, I’m coming. One
minute! Will, I’m going to have to go. Call me as soon as you can. We don’t
have much time.’

As he listened to her voice — which now seemed to oscillate between TC
and Tova Chaya — he heard a double beep.

A text message. He pressed the buttons.

Paul, sort the letters of no
Christian! (1,7,29)

In the bombardment of the last few hours, Will had almost forgotten about
the phantom texter. In his mind, he still associated these messages with Yosef
Yitzhok, even though he knew, rationally, that was impossible. This latest text
was definitive proof: someone else had been giving Will these coded clues all
along. But who?

The meaning of this latest message seemed almost within reach. Forty-eight
hours of communication with this man had given Will some sense of the workings
of his mind. This must be how crossword addicts do it, Will thought: after a while,
they insert themselves into the head of the crossword setter.

And this did indeed look like a crossword clue. Surely, the literal meaning
was irrelevant. He knew how such clues worked, with instructions in one part
relating to the rest. But who was Paul? And why did the solution include a word
twenty-nine letters long?

He would start with the most obvious bit, following the instruction to ‘sort
the letters’, to reorder, ‘no Christian’. With the
recklessness of a newly free man, he grabbed a pen from the desk clerk’s
table and scribbled on the back of the receipt she had just handed him.

On Ian Christ
. That did not work.
Con this rain
. That was not much
better.

And then he saw it, smiling his first smile in hours. How perfect that this
message should arrive just as he was alone, without TC. The one area where he
would have greater knowledge than her.

He picked up the phone to call his father. To tell him the good news that he
had been released without charge and ask him to stop on his way, maybe at a
hotel, and pick up the one thing that Will realized he would need: a bible.

F
or a minute, he thought about
asking the desk sergeant. Then he reconsidered. It would not look great, a
dishevelled murder suspect, alternately ranting about the identity of the true
killer — ‘He has piercing blue eyes!’ — and then
demanding to read the bible. Fine if Will was guilty and pursuing a ‘diminished
responsibility’ defence; not so great for a man who wanted to walk out of
the seventh precinct having convinced the police he was both innocent and sane.

Instead he waited for his father pacing outside, desperate to get away.
Finally William Monroe Sr, dressed in a battered sailing jacket, appeared. He
looked exhausted, his eyes ringed in red. Will wondered if he had been crying.

‘Thank God, William,’ he said, hugging his son, his hand cupping
the back of his head. ‘I wondered what on earth you’d done.’

‘Thanks for that vote of confidence, Dad,’ said Will, pulling away.
‘No time to talk. Do you have the thing I asked you to bring?’

His father nodded, a gesture of sad surrender, as if he was humouring a son
who was babbling about the voices in his head or demanding a hundred bucks for
another fix of crack. ‘Here.’

Will pounced on the bible. ‘OK, Dad. You know those text messages I’ve
been getting? Well, here’s the latest.’ Will held up his cell phone.

Sort the letters of no Christian! (1,7,29)

‘What could that mean?’

Hurriedly, Will explained. ‘No Christian is an anagram for Corinthians.
The figure I refers to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians — and
it must be Chapter 7, Verse 29. Which is why I wanted a bible. And here it is.’

What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short.

‘He’s getting desperate.’

‘Will—’

‘Hold on, Dad. I just want to prove something to you. Now, I know how
bizarre this will sound, but at the heart of this whole, fucked-up business
seems to be a Jewish religious theory. It centres on men of exceptional
goodness.’ He could see his father’s face moving from pity to impatience.

‘Will, what on earth are you talking about? The police brought you
here on suspicion of murder tonight. Do you have any idea of the trouble you’re
in?’

‘Oh yes, Dad, believe me. I know that I am in the deepest shit
imaginable. Deeper than you think. But please hear me out on this. The Hassidim
who are holding Beth say that someone — it may even be one of them for
all I know — is killing good people. Extraordinarily good people. Not
just here, but all over the world. What happened tonight is that I came this
close to witnessing one of those killings. If the Hassidim’s theory is
right, the man who was murdered tonight will be a so-called righteous man.
Which is why I wanted you to see this.’

He took his BlackBerry out of the police zip-loc bag, clicked on the
internet browser and selected Google. Then he punched in the words ‘Bitensky
and Lower East Side’.

Google was searching, not fast on this handheld machine. Finally, a page of
search results. A biomedical website, something about a classical pianist. And
then a link to Downtown Express, ‘the weekly newspaper of lower Manhattan’.
He clicked on it, waited an age for the page to load and then scrolled down. It
was an archive item from a couple of years ago. He prayed for it to be something
of substance, something which might prove to Monroe Sr that his son was not completely
deranged.

Residents of the Greenstreet area endured a chilly start
to the Passover season this week, when their apartment building was evacuated
for a fire alert Tuesday.

It was after midnight when scores of residents filed
together into the park, as fire crews examined the building before declaring it
was safe to re-enter.

While most folks were clothed only in pyjamas and robes,
one group were fully dressed — since they had been taking part in the
traditional seder that often continues until the early hours.

They were guests ofJudah Bitensky, one of the the last
Jewish residents of a building that was once a hub for the East Broadway Jewish
community. It appears that Mr Bitensky, janitor at one of the area’s
remaining synagogues, hosts an annual seder meal at his home — inviting
all those who have no other home to go to.

‘It’s kind of a tradition,’ said
Irving Tannenbaum, 66 and a regular. ‘Every year Judah opens his door to
people like us.

Some of the crowd are elderly and live alone. Some are,
you know, street people. It’s quite a scene in there.’

Riwy Gold, 51 and homeless, added, ‘It’s the
best meal I get all year. This is the one night I feel like I have family.’

Downtown Express
counted twenty-six people heading back into
Mr Bitensky’s tiny apartment — including three in wheelchairs and
two on crutches. Reluctant to give an interview to a reporter, Mr Bitensky was
asked how he was able to feed so many, despite living on a meager income
himself. ‘Somehow I manage,’ he said. I don’t quite know how.’

W
ill maintained his perch by
the window, regularly peeling back the curtain to look out onto the street. He
knew it was foolhardy. If anyone was following him, there could hardly be a
better way to attract their attention. He flapped the material back and forth
so often, he looked as if he were sending a coded message.

He had said goodbye to his father only minutes after they had met up. Monroe
Sr had looked at him blankly when Will called up the Bitensky story on the
BlackBerry, as if the whole business was just too deranged to take seriously.
He had made a gesture with his face and hands —
let’s put all
this nonsense aside
— and asked Will to come back home with him. There
he would have a chance to shower, sleep and generally calm down. Linda would
look after him. For his own part, he had an important case to prepare for that
morning, but he would be back in the evening. Then father and son could put
their heads together and work out how they were going to get Beth back. It was
a tempting offer, but Will declined. He had wasted enough time already. With
thanks he sent his father back to his car — and fired off a text message to
TC.