The Righteous Men (2006) (50 page)

But another voiced tugged at Will. It certainly sounded crazy, but the
evidence was hard to deny. The Hassidim of Crown Heights yearned for Messiah;
so did Christians the world over. Could all those hundreds of millions of
people be wrong? A world without violence or disease, a world of peace and
eternal life. His father was a clever, serious man his intellect was as
formidable as any Will had ever known.

If he believed the truth of this prophecy, that this might really bring
about heaven on earth, was it not gross arrogance for Will to insist he knew
better?

Besides, it was too late to save the righteous men themselves.

At least thirty-five of them were dead; that damage had already been done.
And the decoding of ancient texts finding these men by converting letters into
numbers and then numbers into co-ordinates on the map — all that sounded loopy,
but it had been vindicated. Those men were indeed righteous. Will had seen that
for himself. Could he be so sure that he was right and his father wrong?

Suddenly Laser Eyes was gesturing at his watch, pressing Monroe Sr to hurry.
‘Yes, yes. My friend is right. We have so little time. But Will, it’s
important you know something.

How I worked it out, how I understood that Beth is the mother of a
tzaddik
.’
Will flinched. The word sounded strange, unnatural in the mouth of his father.

‘Because I saw the beauty of it. The pattern. Don’t you see it,
Will? None of it is a coincidence, none of it. Not the stories you wrote for
the newspaper, not this.’ He gestured towards Beth. ‘Not you, not
me. It’s not a coincidence at all. The rabbi here can tell us all about
that. You’d call it beshert, wouldn’t you, Rabbi? “What is
meant to be.” Destiny.

‘Time is running out, William. And it’s time for you to face your
destiny. You’ve been chosen for this holiest of roles.

Don’t you see how perfect it is? How God wants to end everything the
way it all began? It started with Abraham and the request God made of him. You
know what God wanted Abraham to do, don’t you William?’

Will swallowed hard. Cold realization seeped through his veins. His tongue
felt glued to the roof of his mouth. ‘To sacrifice his son.’

‘Exactly. To sacrifice the son he and his wife had wanted for so long.’
Monroe Sr turned to the blue-eyed man, who suddenly produced a long, gleaming
knife. Will’s father handled it gingerly. With respect.

‘That’s why it has to be you, William. Abraham was willing to
slay his beloved Isaac merely to prove his faith. But I’m asking you to
do this for the sake of every human being that ever lived, including all those
now long dead. Let them rise again, William! Let the Kingdom of heaven reign on
earth!’

Will’s nervous system seemed to flood with rage. ‘And would you
do it. Dad? Would you murder your own son?

Would you murder me to bring about the end of the world?’

‘Yes I would, William. I would do it in a heartbeat.’

Will needed to sit down, to close his eyes. He felt dizzy.

Suddenly, just on the edge of his field of vision, he could see a haze of
movement. It was the woman, charging towards Laser Eyes with some kind of
stick: Will realized it was a loose wooden upright, pulled from the banister.
With barely a turn, the man aimed his gun directly into the woman’s face.

He shot twice, sending a cascade of blood and bone across the room. The body
slumped to the ground. There was a second or two of silence. And then Will
could hear and feel Beth behind him, moaning. His own hands were trembling.

‘We need to act fast, William. We cannot tolerate any more delays. The
Almighty has designated a time and even a person to take this last step. The
time is now and the person is you.’

Will guessed there could only be a couple of minutes to go. Outside he could
hear a chorus of voices, now swelling.

Avinu Malkeinu Chatmeinu b’sefer chaim…

Our Father, Our King, seal us in the book of life…

Even muffled by the walls, the intensity of their plea was unmistakable. He
did not understand the words, but he knew their meaning. They were praying, in
the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, for salvation.

The blade was glinting now, as bright and fierce as the flame in his father’s
eye. He spoke calmly, but his eyes were on fire. ‘Take this knife, Will
and do what is right. Do what God has commanded you. Now is the time.’

Will glanced at the rabbi, who finally spoke, his voice querulous.

Will saw his face was splattered with the blood of the woman who had been
murdered in front of them. He seemed to be panting. ‘Your father is
right, Will. This is the moment for you to act. That is what God himself, in
his wisdom, has given to us all: free will. He gives us choice. And now this choice
is yours. You must decide what to do.’

Will gave one last look at his watch. If he could just spin this out a few
moments longer …

But the next second took the decision away. With a cry of ‘Enough
talk!’ Laser Eyes aimed his gun towards Will, his eye squinting as he
took aim. Will could see that the gunman’s real target was not him at
all: he was shooting at Beth and the baby she was carrying.

Uselessly he held up his hands to cry, ‘No!’ But the word barely
came out. Instead, Will felt himself shoved from the side. As he toppled over,
he heard first one gunshot, then another — and saw the falling, almost
flying, figure of Rabbi Freilich. The rabbi had leapt up and pushed Will out of
the way, smothering Beth with his own body. The rabbi had made his own
decision: to take the bullets aimed at Will’s unborn son.

Will seized the moment, charging at Laser Eyes, rushing at his gun hand. The
man squeezed the trigger, but he had been knocked off balance: the shot went
through the glass of the street-facing window. Will had to get the gun from him.
But now he could see his father, the blade bright in his hand, moving towards
the corpse of Rabbi Freilich — looking for Beth.

Finding a strength he had never known, Will was now gripping the assassin’s
gun arm, trying to pull it behind his back: the Nelson arm-lock he had learned
at school. The man began to squeal, his hold on the weapon weakening. Will got a
finger on the handle, but it was not enough. With one eye, he could see his
father had nearly pulled Freilich free: in a matter of seconds, he would be
able to plunge the knife into Beth.

Will wanted to pull away from Laser Eyes and stop his father but he knew it
would be no good: he would be shot before he had crossed the room. He had to
get the gun. He gave one more pull on the man’s arm in a desperate
attempt to wrench the pistol away, but it did not work. The gun did not fall
from his hand. Instead the assassin instinctively tightened his grip,
inadvertently squeezing the trigger.

Will heard the noise and looked down at his hands, expecting to see them
blown away. He was covered in blood but, he realized a second later, it was not
his own. Laser Eyes had shot himself in the back.

Now there was a clear line of sight to his father, who had briefly turned
away from his task at the sound of the gunshot.

For a moment, Will caught his eye. He turned back, his face flushed, as he
finally shoved Freilich’s lifeless body to one side. He raised his knife
high, ready for the plunge into Beth’s stomach.

Will flew at him, the same rugby-tackle motion his father had taught him
perhaps twenty years earlier. It knocked the older man down, away from Beth but
still with the knife in his hand. Now Will was on top of him, staring straight
into his face.

‘Get off me, Will,’ he rasped, his neck muscles engorged.

‘We have so little time.’ His father’s strength shocked
him. It took a supreme effort to keep his arms pinned to the floor; his own
wrists were straining. Monroe Sr’s neck was swelling with the effort to
throw Will off. And still he kept the knife in his hands.

Suddenly, Will felt a new pressure. His father was using his knees to spring
Will off him and it was working; Will was being pushed back. With one more
kick, he threw Will off and jumped to his feet. Still with knife in hand, he
took three purposeful strides towards Beth, who was now backed against the side
wall.

Will could see his father draw back his hand, ready at last to stab Beth’s
womb. But Beth grabbed Monroe Sr’s wrist with both hands, using all her
strength to push it back. The knife hovered for a second — held in
suspension by the equal strength of a true believer’s desire to bring
about heaven on earth and a mother’s determination to protect her unborn child.
The two forces were a match for each other. Will realized he had seen this fire
in his wife’s eyes once before: it was the same feral determination he
had glimpsed in his dream. Then too Beth had been defending a child from
terrible harm.

Now the man’s greater muscle began to show. His hand was advancing,
the knife cutting wild arcs in the air, just in front of Beth’s belly.
The blade made contact — scoring a deep gash in the cloth of her skirt.

Will was filled with a sudden hot burst of adrenalin, the adrenalin of the
truly desperate. Staggering towards the slumped body of Laser Eyes, he uncurled
the assassin’s fingers, still rigidly gripping the weapon, and wrenched
the gun away. Standing parallel with Beth, he aimed precisely at his father’s
head and squeezed the trigger.

W
ill always liked the office
ritual of a cake. A group email would go around the office, or at least one
part of it, announcing that someone was marking a birthday, celebrating a
landmark anniversary or, most often, leaving.

These little ceremonies — a speech from the department head, a
response from the honoree — always gave Will a warm pleasure. Mainly it
was because he was still new enough to the
Times
to enjoy the sense of
membership of a grand old institution — and these occasions ladled out
that sentiment by the bucketload.

‘Farewell to Terry Walton. 4.45 at the Metro Desk.’ It hardly
mattered that Will was no fan of Walton’s; it would still be fun. Not
that he had seen him much in the six months since everything happened; Walton
had scarcely been around.

Maybe he was winding down for his retirement or the job running a local
paper in Florida or whatever else it was he was going to do next.

Six months. It felt longer. Everything about that week felt long ago, even
far away — as if it had happened on a distant planet or in a different
age.

He had had so many hard conversations, the hardest with Tom, at his bedside,
explaining why exactly he had taken a bullet. There was no good reason, Tom had
concluded, coolly logical even in the intensive care ward. Just as there was no
good reason why the bullet had missed his heart by a few inches, lodging in his
shoulder bone instead. ‘If I’d been shorter, I’d be dead,’
Tom had said, woozily. ‘Or do I mean taller? You see what I mean? There
is no logical reason for any of it. We live in the absence of reason.’
After that, he had fallen back to sleep.

TC and Will visited him often in those first few days, but neither of them
was guest of honour. That place was reserved for Beth. When she walked in, Tom
managed a wide beam, rather than a watery smile. She bent over for a mini-hug and
told him he had helped save her life and the life of her child.

He said: ‘Any time.’

Will had had to recount the events of that night and that week over and over
again. First to detectives and lawyers, explaining that he had killed his
father in defence of himself, his wife and his unborn son — an account
that was soon born out by forensic examination of the house in Crown Heights and
subsequent inquiries into the Church of the Reborn Jesus. The police could also
see the terrible fate that had befallen Rabbi Freilich and Rachel Jacobson.
Both Will and Beth spent hours reliving that dreadful night, giving statement after
statement, until they were exhausted.

When they were on their own, Beth described how she had been well treated,
how Mrs Jacobson had mothered her in that house — constantly apologizing
for her captivity, promising that soon all would be explained. Beth had been
first scared, then furious and finally desperate to get word to Will that she
was safe. But, she said, she never once doubted that she would survive. The
Hassidim swore they would not harm her and for a reason she had never quite
understood, she believed them.

So they went together, Will and Beth, to the funerals of Rabbi Freilich and
Mrs Jacobson which, following Jewish custom, were held quickly, as soon as the
coroner released their bodies. There were huge crowds, perhaps three thousand for
Rabbi Freilich, a mighty show of collective grief.

Only then did Will appreciate Freilich’s position among the Hassidim:
he had been their surrogate father, guiding them ever since they had lost their
Rebbe.

A handful of people at the funeral approached Beth, making a small bow of
their head as they came close. Will understood they were showing respect not to
her or him, but to their unborn child, destined to be one of the
lamad vav
.

Will saw a familiar face and he headed over immediately.

‘Rabbi Mandelbaum, I need to ask you something.’

‘I think I know what you want to ask, William. Perhaps you’ll
allow me to give you some advice. Don’t think too deeply about what we
discussed that night. It would not be good for you. Or your child.’

‘But—’

‘It does seem as if the Rebbe understood that your son will have a
special responsibility, that he is to be one of the righteous men. That is a
great honour. But the other matter we discussed, I think this is best left
alone.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘I told you that our tradition suggests one of the
lamad vav
is
the candidate to be the Messiah. If the time is right, if mankind is worthy,
then that person will be the Messiah. If the time is not right, they will live
and die like anyone else.’