The righteous men

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Sunday, 6.46pm, Brooklyn

He wanted to interrogate TO for hours, about her life, about the secret she had kept for so long. Lots of Jewish people became orthodox; they were known as chozer b 'tshuva, literally 'one who returns to repentance'. She had gone the other way: chozer b'she'ela. She had returned to question.

But they had no time for that conversation, no matter how much they wanted it. They had to get to Crown Heights.

Yosef Yitzhok had been murdered, though neither of them had any idea why. The last messages Will had received directing him to Atlas at the Rockefeller Center — had been sent after YY's death, proof that he had not been the informer after all. So why would anyone want him dead? Will was baffled. All he knew was that things were turning steadily more vicious. The rabbi had not been exaggerating: time was running out.

Just as pressing was TO's promise. All would become clear, she had said, once they were in Crown Heights. She could not tell Will herself what was going on. But the explanation lay there. They just had to find it.

'I'm going to need to use your bathroom. And I'm going to need to borrow some of Beth's clothes.'

'Sure,' Will said, trying hard to shrug off the potential symbolism of that request. He led TO to Beth's closet and, steeling himself, pulled back the sliding door. Instantly his nostrils filled with the scent of her. He was sure he could smell her hair; he could think himself into the aroma of that patch of skin below her ear. He breathed in deeply, through his nose.

TO pulled out a plain white blouse, one Beth wore for formal work meetings, usually under a dark trouser-suit. It was cut high, Will noticed. We request that all women and girls, whether living here or visiting, adhere at all times to the laws of modesty…

She turned to Will. 'Does Beth have any really long skirts?'

Will thought hard. There were a couple of long dresses, including a particularly beautiful one he had bought for his wife on their first anniversary. But they were evening wear.

'Hold on,' he said. 'Let me look at the back here.' He wondered if Beth had gotten around to throwing it out; he knew she planned to. It was a long, drab dark velvet skirt that Will had mocked mercilessly. He called it Beth's 'spinster cellist number'. She put up a mock-defence, but she could see his point: it did make her look like one of those silver-haired lady players spotted in every orchestra. But she felt attached to it. To Will's great relief at this moment, she had never got rid of it.

'OK,' said TO, moving towards the bathroom. 'These will have to go.' She cocked her head to one side to take off her earrings. Then she pressed her face closer to the mirror and began the complex manoeuvre of removing her nose-stud.

Finally she gazed down at her middle and unscrewed the ring that pierced her belly button. She now had a small pile of metal in her hand, which she placed by the basin.

'Now for the toughest job of all.' She reached into her bag to produce a newly purchased bottle of shampoo, one specially designed for the task at hand. She started running the tap, grabbed a towel and slung it around her shoulders. As if bracing herself for a nasty ordeal, she bent down and lowered her head towards the water.

As Will watched she began to lather up and rinse. She had to scrub hard, but soon her effort was paying off. The water in the sink began to turn a blueish purple. The dye was coming out, a stream of it swirling around the white porcelain and away. Will was fascinated by the coloured water. It was not only removing a chemical from TO's hair; it seemed to be washing away the last decade of her life.

He left to collect a few things of his own. What had the rabbi said? 'All will become clear in a few days' time.' That was two days ago. Perhaps he was about to close in on the truth, at long last. What would it be? What was this 'ancient story' into which he and his wife had somehow fallen? Once he knew, would he be back with her? Would he hold her again? Would that be tonight? 'So, what do you think?'

Will wheeled around to see a different woman. Her hair was now dark brown, brushed straight and long into a 1990s style bob. She wore sensible black shoes, a long black skirt and a white blouse. She had borrowed a thick, quilted jacket of Beth's that, in other circumstances, might have been fashionable but which now looked only practical. Standing there in his apartment was a woman who could have passed for any of the young wives and mothers he had seen in Crown Heights two days earlier. She looked like Tova Chaya Lieberman.

'I'm so glad for the shoes. Thank God, they fit me and that's all that counts It took Will a moment to realize what TO was doing. She was trying out the sing-song, Yiddish-inflected accent of a New York Hassidic woman. It came to her so easily, it persuaded Will immediately.

'Wow. You sound… different.'

This was the music of my youth, Will,' she said, sounding like TO once more. Except there was a wistfulness in her voice he had never heard before. Then, snapping out of it: 'Now, what about you?'

Me?'

'Yes, you. We're going there together. Tova Chaya wouldn't be seen with some shaygets. You need to look the part, too.

Now, come on: black suit, white shirt. You know the drill.'

Will did as he was told, finding the plainest outfit he could.

He had to reject a suit with a pin-stripe and a white shirt with a Ralph Lauren polo player on the chest. Plain, plain, plain.

He looked in the mirror, hoping his transformation would be as convincing as TO's. But his face gave him away. He might have passed for American, but Jewish? No. He had the colouring and bone structure of an Anglo-Saxon whose roots lay in the villages of England rather than the steppes of Russia. Still, that need not be a problem. Had he not seen the faces of Hanoi and Helsinki among the faithful on Friday night? He would say he was a convert.

He only needed one last thing. 'TO, where am I going to get a skullcap from at this time of night?'

'I already thought of that.' With a flourish, TO held up a large black disc of material. 'I borrowed it from your friend Sandy when we were in the park.'

'Borrowed?'

'Well, I knew they always carry spares. And I just happened to be glancing into one of his jacket pockets. Here, put it on.'

As if in a ceremony, TO stretched onto tiptoes and placed the yarmulke onto Will's head. She dashed into the bathroom and came back with a hairclip. 'There,' she said, attaching it just so. 'Reb William Monroe, it's a pleasure to meet you.'

Once in the cab, Will felt himself begin to twitch with excitement — and nerves. He had never so much as attempted an undercover assignment and that's what this had become.

He was in costume, trying to pass himself off as somebody else. His protective armour — chinos, blue shirt, notebook was gone. He felt exposed.

In a bid for reassurance, he reached for his cell phone — a memento of his regular life. A new message, apparently from the same unknown sender he had once thought was Yosef Yitzhok.

Just nen we are, our nunber few

Desoribable in digits two

We're halved if these do multiply

If we few perish then all nust die.

He had no idea what it meant but it hardly mattered now.

According to TO, everything was about to be explained. Habit made him check his BlackBerry next. The red light was blinking: a Guardian News Alert. Nostalgia had made him an electronic subscriber to the paper he used to read back home.

Ordinarily, he rapidly deleted these email updates: he had enough to do keeping up with the news in New York and America. But that 'alert' did the trick: what breaking news might justify its own bulletin? He clicked it open.

The Robin Hood of Downing Street Britain's hottest political scandal in decades took its most bizarre turn yet today.

The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gavin Curtis, who police believe took his own life last week, seems set to be transformed overnight from a disgraced hate figure into a posthumous folk hero. Treasury officials, who earlier revealed that Mr Curtis had diverted large chunks of the UK's budget into a private Swiss bank account, have this morning disclosed where that money ended up — in the hands of the world's poorest people.

Instantly hailed by the tabloids as a 'real-life Robin Hood', it seems Mr Curtis spent much of his seven years at Britain's exchequer robbing from the rich to give to the poor.

'Our government grant doubled, then tripled under Mr Curtis,' said Rebecca Morris, a spokeswoman for Action on Hunger, a leading relief agency. 'We thought it was just government policy.'

It was nothing of the kind. Instead such generosity to those fighting the wars on poverty, HIV/Aids and famine was the personal decision of Mr Curtis himself- made possible by taking money out of dormant bank accounts that had laid unnoticed and unclaimed for years and then burying the details in a bafflingly complex labyrinth of Treasury data.

Some observers speculate that the Chancellor went further in recent months, finding extra funds by raiding subsidies earmarked for Britain's arms exporters. 'They got less so that the starving of Africa and the sick of the Indian Ocean could get more,' explained a ministerial ally last night. One report suggested it was this move which led to his eventual exposure.

'He must have known the risks he was taking,' Ms Morris told the Guardian. 'And yet he was prepared to do all that, just so the hungriest and weakest would have a better chance.

I can't tell you how many lives Gavin Curtis must have saved.

Some will call this a scandal, but I think this was the action of a truly righteous man.'