The righteous men

CHAPTER TWENTY

Friday, 11.35pm, Brooklyn

Tom answered his phone within one ring. He told Will, who had been stumbling through the streets of Crown Heights looking for the subway, to hail a cab and head straight over to his apartment.

Now he lay on Tom's couch, fit to pass out with tiredness, kept awake only by a kind of fever. He was wearing nothing but three thick towels. Tom had shoved him in a hot shower the minute he walked through the door, determined that his friend not succumb to a cold, a fever or even pneumonia. He knew they had no time to waste with illness.

Will did his best to tell him what had happened, but most of it was too bizarre to take in. Besides, Will spoke like a man just woken trying to remember a dream: new bits of information, new characters, new descriptions and phrases kept popping up. There were so few items of normality for Tom to cling to, he gave up making sense of it after a while. Bearded men, a near-drowning, a sign telling women to cover their elbows, an unseen inquisitor, a leader worshipped as the Messiah, a rule preventing people from carrying even keys for twenty-four hours. He wondered if Will had gone to Crown Heights at all, rather than to the East Village to score some particularly strong acid and embark on one of the more surreal trips in recent hallucinogenic history.

Harder to resist was the urge to say, 'I told you so.' This was precisely the outcome Tom had feared: Will charging into Crown Heights, under-prepared and out of his mind with anguish, clumsily walking into the hands of his enemies.

Not only did Will expect Tom to follow his account of the last, baffling few hours, he also wanted his help in trying to decode it. What was that reference to his work? What did the Rebbe mean about an ancient story, about saving lives, about having just four days to go? 'Will,' Tom said after his friend had spoken for nearly fifteen uninterrupted minutes, trying to break his flow. 'Will.'

No luck; he kept on talking. Finally, Tom had to break with his own iron rule and raise his voice. 'WILL!'

At last, he stopped.

'Will, this is too serious for us to keep flailing around like amateurs. We need expert help now.'

'What, the police?'

'Well, we should think about it.'

'Of course I've fucking thought about it. I thought about it when I had my head in the deep freeze. But I don't think I can risk it. I saw these people, Tom. They were ready to kill me tonight, on some hunch. Because I wasn't wearing a wire and because I do have a foreskin. Or some such crazy nonsense. They were going to drown me. The guy gave me the full, theological justification — all this stuff about Peking Nuff-said or whatever it was. Essentially, you can take a life if it will save lives — and the life they were thinking of taking this evening was mine. And maybe Beth's. So yes, I've thought about it, but what I think is, the risk is too great. From the very beginning they've said it: if we go to the police, she's not safe. And now, having seen them — or not seen them I think they mean it. They're serious people. They're not messing about.'

'OK, so we need some other kind of help.'

'Like what?'

'Like Jews.'

'What?'

'We need to talk to someone Jewish who can begin to make sense of everything you saw and heard. We know nothing. All we've got is what you heard underwater and what we can get off the internet. It's not enough.'

Will recognized the logic. It was true. He had been bluffing his way through in that typically English way. They taught it in the best public schools: bullshit studies. Learn to get by on native wit and charm. Never be anything so boring as a qualified expert; be the gifted amateur. That's what he had done by marching into Crown Heights in his bloody chinos with his bloody notebook. As if it would all fall into his charming English lap. They needed help.

'Who?'

'What about Joel?'

'Joel Kaufman?' He had been in the journalism programme with Will at Columbia; he was now writing for the sports pages of Newsday. 'He's Jewish but only technically. He barely knows more than I do.'

'Ethan Greenberg?'

'He's in Hong Kong. For the Journal.'

'This is pathetic. We're in New York. We must know some Jews!'

'I actually know plenty of Jews Will said, thinking suddenly of Schwarz and Woodstein in the pod at work, which in turn reminded him that he had made no contact with the office all day. He had ignored Harden's email. He would have to do something; he couldn't just go AWOL. But it was too much to think about; he shoved the thought aside, telling himself he would deal with it as soon as he left Tom's apartment.

'The trouble is, I can't start blabbing about this situation to just anyone. The risk is too great. It has to be someone who is not just Jewish but who's smart enough to know Jewish things, who might know about this world,' he gestured towards the screen, still flickering with the map of Eastern Parkway, 'and who we can trust. I can't think of anyone who falls into that category.'

I can,' said Tom, though his face registered no pleasure at the fact.

'Who?'

'to: 'You can't be serious. TO? To help Beth?'

'Who else can do it, Will? Who else?'

Will fell back onto the couch, clenching his jaw, the muscle inside his cheek tightening on and off as if pulsing with an alternating current. Once again, Tom was right. TO checked all the boxes. She was Jewish, smart and would never betray a secret. But how could he make that phone call? They had not spoken in more than four years.

For nearly nine months, from the start of Columbia to that Memorial Day weekend, they had been inseparable. She was a fine art student and Will had fallen for her before either of them had said a word. He could not lie: it was lust. She was the woman on campus everyone noticed, from the diamond stud in her nose to the ring that pierced her belly button; from the flat, constantly exposed midriff to the tint of blue running through her hair. Most women over the age of sixteen could not carry off that look, but TO had enough natural beauty to get away with it.

They had started dating straight away, becoming virtual recluses in his tiny apartment on 113th and Amsterdam. They would have sex in the daytime, eat Chinese food, see movies and have more sex until it was morning again.

Appearances were misleading. People saw the blue hair and the navel ring and assumed TO was a wild, free spirit one of those girls in movies who leap onto the roof to dance in the moonlight or take spontaneous rides to the shore to see the fishing boats. Despite the piercings and torn jeans, TO was not like that. Underneath that neo-hippy exterior, Will soon discovered a precise, analytical brain that could be terrifying in its demand for exactitude. Conversation with TO was a mental work-out: she let Will get away with nothing.

She seemed to have read everything — citing plot lines from Turgenev one moment, the central doctrinal tenets of Lutheranism the next — and have absorbed it all. The only crack in her armour, again defying all expectations, was popular culture. She could get by on the most recent stuff, but dip into the childhood memories she and Will were meant to share and she would become clueless. Mention Grease and she assumed you meant Greece; refer to 'Valley Girls' and she would ask, 'Which valley?' Will found it endearing; besides, it was reassuring to know there was one area where the human database he was dating had a defect. He concluded the two facts were related: when kids like him were watching mindless TV and listening to trashy pop, TO had been reading, reading, reading.

Mind you, all that was a guess. TO only spoke about her childhood in the vaguest terms. (Even her name remained a mystery: a nickname she had got as a toddler, she said, its origins forgotten.) He had never met her parents or siblings: that would be impossible. Despite her own aggressively irreligious life — she made a point of ordering jumbo shrimp and sweet and sour pork — she explained that her family were still fairly traditional and they would just not accept a Gentile boyfriend. 'But we're not getting married!' he would say. 'It doesn't matter,' would be the reply. 'Even the theoretical possibility that one day we might, that we are together at all, is bad enough. For them.'

They went through all the arguments. He would accuse her unseen parents — and he never even glimpsed a photograph of them — of racism, as bad as the prejudice of any anti-Semite who would bar his daughter going out with a Jew. She would then walk him through the long, bloody course of Jewish history. Knowledgeable as ever, she would tell how, across continents and down the centuries, Jews had been tormented, clinging only perilously to their lives and the civilization they had created. Jewish culture could not survive, people like her parents believed, if it gradually dissolved, through intermarriage and assimilation, into the general population — like a drop of blue hair-dye in an ocean of clear water. 'So that's what your parents believe,' Will would say. 'What about you?

What do you believe?'

Her answers were never clear enough, not for Will. The arguments became too tiring. And, while the forbiddenness of their romance had been a thrill at first, making them coconspirators in the Manhattan winter, by the spring it had begun to pall. He did not like feeling that their fate was being decided by a vast, external force — five thousand years of history — of which he knew so little and over which he had no influence. By the time he met Beth, he knew he and TO had run out of road.

It ended very badly. He had been a coward and started seeing Beth before breaking off properly from TO: she had found a digital picture of the new girlfriend on his computer.

That was bad enough, but she was furious that what they had come to call 'the Jewish thing' had proved so decisive.

She was angry with him for allowing that to be an obstacle — for rejecting her because of 'a fact about myself I cannot change' — but he always had the feeling the fury was not only directed at him. He could see she was raging at a heritage, a culture,' that she had mostly abandoned but which had pulled her apart from a man she had loved. Their last conversation was a shouting match. His last image of her was a face raw with tears. Occasionally, he wondered who had won out: the uptight parents or the blue-streaked world of art and adventure that had so enthralled the girl he had fallen in love with.

Now Tom was suggesting he get in touch. Tonight, at nearly midnight. He had her cell phone number; but what would he say? How would he explain that the only reason he was making contact was because he needed something — and that was for the sake of the woman who had stolen him from her? How would he make that call? And why would she do anything but slam the phone down, vowing never to speak to him again?

And yet, he was desperate and Tom was right. She was the closest thing to the expert they needed. He would have to do it. He would have to put aside his own emotions, including his cowardice, and dial that number. Now.

He paced up and down the room for a while, mentally scripting his opening. It was like writing for the paper: once he had his first line, he had the courage to plunge in, hoping instinct would take care of the rest. To increase his chances for success, or at least to prevent immediate failure, he also played a cheap trick.

He reckoned that if TO's number was still stored on his phone, there was at least a possibility that his lived on in her SIM card, too. He imagined the sight of his name flashing up on her screen. So he called from Tom's line, knowing his number would be wholly unfamiliar. It was an ambush call.

'Hello, TO? It's Will.' Loud noise in the background. A club?

A party? 'Hi.'

'Will Monroe.'

'I don't know any other Wills, Will. Not before, not since.

What's up?'

He had to hand it to her: as an instant response, with barely a second's thinking time, that was not bad. And entirely typical: the hint of a put-down, the reference to their past, the rapid-fire formulation. The only bum note was that 'what's up?' It was not her kind of phrase, the lightness in it too forced. In those words, he heard the strain of speaking to a man whom she had loved and who had rejected her.

'I need to see you very soon. You know I wouldn't trouble you like this unless it was very important. And this is very important. I think it's a matter of life and death.'

He swallowed on that last word and he knew TO had heard him.

'Is something wrong with your mom? Is she OK?'

'It's Beth. I know-' He could not complete that sentence: he was not sure what came next. 'I need to see you right away.'

She did not ask any more questions. She just gave him her address. Not her home, but her work: a complex of artists' studios in Chelsea. She said it would be nearer, but Will suspected there was another motive. Maybe she was with someone else; perhaps she was ashamed still to be alone; or maybe she just could not face the intimacy of having Will in her apartment.

Artists' studios. Even in that nugget of information, there was a whole story. It meant she had made good her promise: she had dreamed of being an artist, they talked about it through those long, bed afternoons. But he, and even she, had wondered whether she had the nerve to go through with it. He was glad she had done it. More than glad; proud.

Less than an hour later he found himself stepping out of a service elevator, an old-style one complete with concertina iron gate. He suspected this was not a mechanical necessity, but a bohemian affectation: the artists' colony in their converted factory. He emerged on the fourth floor, silent and dark. He could just make out a corner reserved for a sculptress who seemed to specialize in female bellies. He turned past what looked like a metal workshop, but was in fact the workspace of a man who created installations using neon.

Finally he saw a photocopied notice: TO. Just those two letters, no first or last name. Smart branding, Will thought as he knocked lightly on the partition door to announce his arrival.

Instinctively he had decided that male, English politeness would be his defence against her female, all-American fury.

He had only a second or two to take it all in: walls covered with paintings, three more on easels, yet more covered in bubble-wrap, leaned up against the walls. A plain, battered table covered with clutter. On a counter that ran the length of the back wall, artists' materials — bottles of white spirit; oil paints in bent, metal toothpaste tubes; glue; knives; various rusty scrapers; string and, unaccountably, a cookery book which seemed to have lost all its pages.

Towards the back of the room, on a threadbare red velvet couch, TO. She was smaller than he remembered but nothing else was diminished: she was still a woman who made you stare. Her hair was now shoulder length, where once it had been punkily short. Most of it was a natural brown but for that trademark streak of blue, still there. Taking in her flimsy, vaguely vintage shirt, above tight jeans, torn at the knees, he could see the shape that had once made him weak. In the semi-dark he spotted a glint of metal: the navel ring, still in place.

This had been the moment he was most uncertain of: should he hug her, kiss her on the cheek, shake hands or do nothing? But she made the decision for him, standing up and opening her arms as if welcoming back a prodigal son.

He fell into a hug and tried, through the positioning of his arms and hands, to make it somehow — what was the word — fraternal.

'What's the problem, Will?'

He told her as methodically and briefly as he could: the email, Tom's tracing of it to Crown Heights, Will's visit, the interrogation, the trial by mikve.

'You've got to be kidding,' she said when that last detail dropped, her face giving a smirk that was either disbelief, nervous tension, schadenfreude or a little bit of all three. The semi-smile vanished when she saw Will's reaction. She could see this was deadly serious. 'Will, I feel for you, I really do.

And my heart goes out to Beth's family.' Beth. He had never heard TO say her name before. 'But what exactly do you need from me?'

'I need to know what you know. I need you to explain to me what I heard. I need you to translate for me.'

She responded with a small, wan smile that somehow made her look older. At that moment, Will realized ageing was not chiefly about lines or wrinkles, though those things played their part. The years really showed in expressions like the one he had just seen. Suddenly TO's was a face of years; of knowledge.

'OK. Very slowly and with as much detail as you can remember, you have to tell me everything that happened.

Every street you walked, every person you met, every word they used. I'll put some coffee on.'

Will fell back in the wicker chair TO had pulled up for him.

For the first time in sixteen hours, he let his muscles relax.

He was so relieved: TO was on side. He was filled with a sentiment he had never had when they were together; he felt that TO was going to look after him.

She was, Will soon realized, a skilful interviewer, patient but methodical, demanding that he be precise about each detail, going back over episodes to ensure he had not missed anything. She pointed out contradictions too, in that old forensic way of hers. 'Hold on, you said there was only you and two others in the room. Who is this new person?' 'What did he say exactly? Did he say, "I will" or "I might"?'

Her precision exhausted him. By way of a break, he let his eyes wander towards her work, scattered around the room.

Large canvasses depicting classic Americana — naturalistic paintings of a yellow cab or a vintage diner — and, much as he admired their technical skill, he found himself wondering if TO was not in the wrong line of work. She had too clear a mind, too linear and logical, to be an artist. Surely with a brain like hers she should be a scholar or a lawyer or, on current form, a police officer? Wisely, he thought, Will did not say any of this.

By the time he had got to the end, he realized TO had so far explained nothing. Each time she had opened her mouth, it was only to seek clarification from him or to ask supplementary questions. He knew no more now than he had when he left Crown Heights. He began to feel impatient. But he did not dare voice his frustration; he had to keep TO as an ally. Besides, he was nearly faint with fatigue; his words were starting to slur.

He woke when his elbow slipped off the chair arm. He could tell from the taste in his mouth that he had fallen into a brief but deep sleep. He had dreamed of chants and dances, with Beth at the centre, surrounded, like a tribal queen, by men in white shirts and black suits.

Will looked at his watch; two-thirty am. So this was not a nightmare, just a terrifying long day and night that seemed never to end. It had begun when he powered up his BlackBerry some eighteen hours ago. And now, incredibly, he was half-asleep in TO's wicker chair and it was still going on.

'Hi, you're back,' she said, suddenly looking up from an artist's sketch pad that rested on her knees. Her forehead was crinkled in a way, Will remembered, that meant she had been concentrating hard. 'Here's what we've got. The first fact is they say Beth is safe — so long as you back off. Second, they seem to admit that she's done nothing wrong and maybe even nothing at all, but they cannot let her go. They acknowledge that this seems baffling now but, they promise, it will all become clear. We know from their emailed notes to you that they don't want money. They just want you to go away.

That's it.

'What this adds up to is one very weird kind of kidnapping.

It's like they somehow want to borrow her for some unspecified time and some unspecified reason — and they expect you just to take it. We need to work out why.' Will found that we comforting, even if the rest of the puzzle — and the fact that TO had not instantly cracked it — was anything but.

'So what do we have on motive? A clue is surely that they feared you were a fed. The charitable explanation for that is that they feared the feds were coming after them simply because of the kidnapping. The uncharitable view is that their fear was separate from the kidnapping, that they are involved in some other criminal activity and had long worried that the authorities were onto them. Kind of like those weirdo cults who lie in wait for the feds to come and take their guns away.'

Will had a flash of memory back to Montana, Pat Baxter and his chums. Christ, that was only a few days ago; it felt like years.

'But then they rule that out, for fairly rational reasons. I don't know about the wire, but I reckon they're right about the undercover Jew thing: that is what the feds would do.

Yet, your not being a federal agent does not reassure them.

Quite the opposite. It's once they've ruled that out that they get really heavy, nearly drowning you. That also makes some sense: they wouldn't dare mistreat you if they thought you were law enforcement. Once you weren't, they felt free. The question, though, is why? What could be, to use their phrase,

"infinitely worse"? A rival Hassidic sect? A rival kidnapping cartel?'

Will detected a glint of mischief in TO's eye, as if she was still taken by the humour of Hassidim up to no good. It irritated him; and she still had not come up with anything he did not know already.

'What about all the Jewish stuff I heard, what does that all mean?' He wanted to get her back on track.

'Well, the phrase you heard as "Peking Nuff-said" is actually pikuach nefesh. The safeguarding of a soul. It is usually used benignly, to forgive various infractions of religious law in order to do good. You know, you'll hear the Israelis invoke pikuach nefesh to explain why ambulances are allowed to run on the Sabbath. But by mentioning it alongside all that stuff about a rodef, they were obviously using it to threaten you to imply that Jewish law might allow them to kill you. Or Beth.'

Will winced.

'As for "Shabbos something" that's real. What you heard was Shabbos Shuva, the Sabbath of repentance, the most important Shabbat of the year. That's today, as it happens. It's the one between Rosh Hashana, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We're in the middle of the Ten Days of Penitence, the Days of Awe. This is a big time for Jews.

For the ultra-orthodox especially. But what did your questioner mean by "we have only four days left"? It's true there are only four days till Yom Kippur, but, judging from what you said, he meant it as some kind of deadline. He can't mean just four days left to repent, though they would think that.

This must be connected to the wider thing he mentioned: you know, "everything hangs in the balance", "the stakes could not be higher", "the ancient story".'

'And as far as all that stuff is concerned, we haven't got a clue, have we?'

TO had her head down, consulting her sketch pad. He could see she was desperate to find something that would unlock this mystery. She had corralled all the facts as best she could, organized a coherent set of questions. But that's all she had: questions. 'No,' she said quietly. 'We haven't.'

'What about the Rebbe?'

'Ah, yes. Now I need you to think hard on this one. Did he ever say his name to you? Did he ever introduce himself to you?'

'I told you, he never let me see his face.'

'So why are you so certain he was the Rebbe?'

'Because they were all chanting and stamping and waiting for him inside the synagogue. Then I get led away. These thugs say they can't talk to me until their "teacher" arrives.

Then, when he does, they do whatever he tells them to do.

He was obviously the boss.'

'When you were in the synagogue and you felt a hand on your shoulder, and the voice said, "For you my friend, it's all over" or whatever he said, that voice was the same one who interrogated you later?'

'Yes, same voice.'

'So if that was the Rebbe how come the crowd was not facing in that direction, looking towards him? If that were him, surely every face in the room would have been looking just past your shoulder, going nuts for the guy who is within whispering distance of your ear. But they weren't, were they?'

'Maybe he was just hidden from view, crushed in that huge crowd.'

'Come on, Will. You said it yourself: they worship this guy as if he's the Messiah. They're not going to just let him wander around, getting mashed by the foot soldiers. Think hard, did he ever announce himself as the Rebbe?'

Will realized with embarrassment that his tormentor had never said any such thing. Now that he thought about it- 'Did you ever address him as Rebbe?'

TO had read his mind. Throughout the ordeal, Will had assumed he was speaking to the Rebbe. Inside his own head, he referred to him as Rebbe. But had he ever used the term out loud? 'So you're sure that man who nearly had me killed tonight was not the Rebbe?'

'I know it.'

'How? How can you be so certain?'

'I'm certain, Will, because the Rebbe of Crown Heights has been dead and buried for two years.'