36 Righteous Men

by Steven Pressfield

  Here is how Manning teaches me “the street.” We drive to Canarsie, just east of Rockaway Parkway, a few miles west of JFK. We park. Manning says nothing. We watch. At least that’s what I think we’re doing. I adhere to Manning’s baseline directive, valid under all circumstances:

  Watch me. Do what I do.

  The neighborhood is South Brooklyn. We have come straight from the steam baths. Manning is scoping the skimmers. When these scavengers find thrown-away burner phones, which they do in quantities I could never have imagined, from dumpsters, trash cans, gutters, storm drains, etc., they collect them into black plastic trash bags. (Every skimmer carries one.)

  We’re tracking one particular kid, about thirteen, with a bag as stuffed as Santa Claus. It’s not all burners. He’s got soda cans, wire hangers, metal and plastic of all kinds. Finally he hoists his bounty. Time to cash in.

  Ten minutes later I’m scrambling in Manning’s wake across the flat, litter-strewn roof of a building that feels like it’s swaying with each footfall we set down. Howard Beach/East New York/Canarsie was destroyed by Superstorm Lorelei in September ’21. Entire blocks were leveled, building foundations undermined in the fourteen-foot storm surge. What derelict structures remain have been taken over as shooting galleries, or by squatters as “sit-downs” or “lay-bys.” Unpermitted sweatshops and pop-up junk stores fill in the voids.

  Manning has recruited two uniformed patrol officers, twenty-two-year-old beat cops whom we have run into randomly on the street. They’re our backup. As with me, he tells them nothing, doesn’t ask their names or volunteer his. “Hey,” he says, tipping his gold shield and waving them to his side. “Learn something.”

  Manning crosses the rooftop in easy, unhurried strides. He jimmies an access door. We grope down a flight of steps, Manning in the lead, me second, the uniforms in the caboose, into an unlit, debris-choked stairwell. Manning hasn’t told any of us what we’re doing or what role we’re supposed to play.

  We have followed the young skimmer. He entered Building #1 via a side alley. To trail him directly would apparently give us away, so . . . up a five-story fire escape of the adjacent derelict, Building #2, across the roof, and now down.

  A door.

  We stop.

  Voices and machinery can be heard on the far side.

  Manning sets his gold detective’s shield in its black leather case in his left hand, badge exposed. In his right appears his service weapon. I ape him. So do the beat cops. My heart is starting to fibrillate. Manning turns toward us displaying his weapon with its three safeties on—slide, grip, and trigger. We juniors follow.

  “You,” he whispers to the beat cops. “Disarm and cuff whoever is behind this door.”

  The next thing I know, all four of us are through the door, past a snoozing, shaved-skull bruiser packing a shotgun, and striding—Manning and me—holding badges high, down the central walkway of an abandoned factory, made over into a Tech Age sweatshop.

  MANNING

  (shouts to all)

  Police officers! Everyone remain calm!

  Stay where you are!

  The work floor is wall-to-wall with cramped, doorless cubicles, each manned by an Asian or African female. The women are rebuilding and recharging throwaway phones. In the center of the floor, on a platform raised several feet above the ladies’ carrels, squats a boss’s station. Manning stalks straight to it.

  A white man in shirtsleeves wearing a yarmulke springs to his feet. He holds up both hands, calling out something to the factory women in a language I don’t recognize. Half of the ladies had bolted upright as well, wild-eyed, two seconds away from stampeding for the exits.

  They calm down.

  Manning has holstered his weapon. I can’t hear what he’s saying to the sweatshop boss. (He has motioned me to cover a side door.) Plainly the workspace is unlicensed, uninsured, in violation no doubt of scores of fire and safety regs.

  Manning without a word has communicated to the yarmulke-wearing owner or manager or whatever he is that he, Manning, doesn’t give a shit about any of this.

  He’s asking questions.

  The boss is answering.

  The boss calls again to the women on the floor. Again I have no idea what language he’s speaking.

  In response, one of the ladies raises her hand.

  Manning and the boss cross immediately to this female.

  I can’t stand to stay in the dark any longer. I step to the cubicle too.

  The factory woman is Laotian or Cambodian, I can’t tell which. She wears a smock and a hairnet. Her workstation holds a dozen disassembled burner phones, with SIM cards, screens, memory units, and lithium-ion batteries spread across an assembly table. She wears magnifying lenses. Atop her work surface is an additional lighted magnifier. Two computer consoles flank the workspace.

  MANNING

  (to boss and factory woman)

  Eleven thirty-six oh six oh nine.

  The woman looks scared to death. She glances helplessly to the boss, but cannot make her eyes rise to look at Manning. For some reason I find myself putting a hand gently on her shoulder. She peers up into my face. She can’t believe an Asian female is a cop.

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  (to Manning)

  You’re certain that’s the last call?

  Manning shows him the record sheet. The boss takes the phone from the factory woman. He inserts the memory-component end into a slot on one of her consoles. A screen lights up, displaying the phone’s record of calls.

  Only two.

  The first one matches, to the thousandths of a second, the time when the “lamed vav” text came in to Manning’s phone.

  The second is spot-on to the follow-up text.

  MANNING

  Where did the other texts or calls go?

  The ones made before these final two.

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  Scrubbed.

  The boss scrolls down the record sheet for Manning to see.

  Blank.

  MANNING

  How could someone do that?

  Two items, the boss explains, make these burners different from legal phones—a password randomizer and a trace mimic. “The phones ‘pretend’ to be real,” he says. “They piggyback digitally onto existing numbers.”

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  Scrub the number and you delete all record of the call. But to do that, you’d need tech gear that even we don’t have.

  MANNING

  But whoever erased the main body of the outgoing texts left a record of the final two—the last ones made before they threw the phone away. Why would they do that?

  The question is rhetorical. Manning is asking himself.

  Because they were lazy?

  Because they screwed up?

  Or because they wanted us to know about the final two texts—and that this was the phone that made them?

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  I have no idea. But I’ll tell you one thing. Whoever tricked out this burner knows their shit.

  Manning walks the boss outside into the hall. He signs to the uniforms that they can release the shotgun sentry and return to their regular duty. They do.

  From his wallet Manning tugs a twenty. He hands it to the boss. “For the woman inside,” he says. He pulls out a hundred and slips it into the chief’s shirt pocket.

  Manning indicates the skullcap atop the boss’s head.

  MANNING

  “Lamed” and “vav” are Hebrew letters, right?

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  Thirty-six. The Thirty-Six Righteous Men.

  Manning’s look says, What’s that?

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  It’s a legend. God protects the world for the sake of the Thirty-Six. When they’re gone, all bets are off.

  MANNING

  Meaning what?

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  God destroys everything.

  This stops Manning.

  MANNING

  Righteous Men? What does the legen
d mean by that? What makes someone “righteous”?

  SWEATSHOP BOSS

  You’re asking me?

  Ten minutes later Manning has the address of the kiosk that sold the phone and we’re on our way.

  8

  LITTLE HONG KONG

  MANNING PUNCHES THE DEALER SO hard in the chest that his (the dealer’s) lower denture pops out and goes sailing across the display case.

  CONTRABAND DEALER

  What the fuck!

  The dealer’s choppers clatter onto the grimy steel floor. We’re in a phone seller’s kiosk, a converted shipping container on Jamaica Bay, in the floating mall the locals call Little Hong Kong.

  The dealer is some kind of Bahamian or Trinidadian. He’s got dreads and that charming Calypso accent. Not now, of course, as he spits and attempts to lunge past Manning to retrieve his lowers.

  With a sweep of his leg, so fast I don’t even see it, Manning takes the dealer’s legs out from under him. The poor guy face-plants, full weight, into the deck. I hear a scream. The dealer’s wife appears from a living section at the stern of the container. A boy and a girl, no older than four, cling to her skirts.

  With one hand Manning hauls the dealer upright.

  MANNING

  I asked you nicely, didn’t I?

  Manning lifts the guy six inches off the floor. “No, no!” the dealer is bawling. “Not the merch!”

  Manning flings him into the display case. Clearly this artifact is the man’s pride and joy. It shatters into a million shards. The dealer crashes among splintered glass and featured sale items—counterfeit bags from Hermes, Kate Spade, and Bottega Veneta, a set of knockoff Craftsman socket wrenches, and, displayed impeccably on the now-demolished top shelf, throwaway iPhones and Galaxies.

  CONTRABAND DEALER

  Have a heart, man! I spill who bought the burner and who will buy another from me?

  Manning is getting a migraine. I can see it in his eyes. He reaches down with both hands and seizes the dealer. From the echo-chamber rear, wife and kids pump up the volume of wailing and squealing.

  Manning takes aim on a second display of breakable merchandise.

  CONTRABAND DEALER

  Okay, okay! Stop!

  Human faces, at least a dozen, all Asian, Arab, or African, have appeared on the walkway outside the container door. Other merchants and shoppers. Manning shoots a glance to me. I raise my shield and advance menacingly.

  The lookie-loos vaporize.

  Manning has retrieved the dreadlocked dealer’s lower denture from the container floor. He wipes the appliance with a tissue from a box that had been on top of the display case. He hands it back to its owner.

  The dealer accepts the device tentatively, examining it for fractures.

  CONTRABAND DEALER

  She was white. Thirty, maybe. Dressed like shit. She paid in reds.

  Reds is local scrip. Good in South Brooklyn and nowhere else.

  Manning has me cue up on my phone the fuzzy video I shot of the woman outside the Georgetown townhouse.

  He takes the phone and shows it to the dealer.

  CONTRABAND DEALER

  Why the fuck didn’t you show me this before you wrecked my place?

  You exit Little Hong Kong on foot along a series of suspended walkways, like rain forest bridges, swaying dubiously about eight inches above the petro-scum surface of Jamaica Bay. These catwalks have no handrails. They’re about as wide as a lawn mower. This constriction, however, does nothing to retard the bumper-to-bumper, two-way traffic of pushcarts, mopeds, deliverymen and -women using Chinese coolie carrying poles, tea and coffee hawkers with their dispenser tanks on their backs, not to mention hookers, skimmers, incense peddlers, acrobats, jugglers, three-card monte dealers, political orators, one-legged guys selling wild Siberian chaga, bhang, khosh, naswar, and half a hundred types of aphrodisiacs, psychedelics, soporifics, and herbal intoxicants that I’ve never heard of and neither have you. Canvas sheets overhead shield the floating city from the sun. Beneath these, shops founded on houseboats, moored water taxis, Asiatic junks, float-suspended freight containers, and Navy surplus Zodiacs peddle cures for baldness, impotence, incontinence, sleep apnea, herpes, and chronic bad breath. You can buy roasted duck, grilled yak, barbecued char. The only thing you can’t get is a hamburger.

  Every fourth catwalk holds a directory, which invariably is so faded from diesel fumes and the acid effluence of the bay that you can’t read it. Besides, it’s in Chinese. The city itself is a maze. How Manning got in is a mystery; how he’s navigating out is equally incomprehensible. We pass shops selling phone cards, fake Rolexes, I NY T-shirts, WORLD’S GREATEST DAD coffee mugs, and plastic models of the Statue of Liberty.

  My text window meanwhile keeps pinging with messages from Gleason’s tech sergeant:

  WHERE THE HELL R U?

  GET MANNING TO PICK UP!

  HAUL UR ASSES BACK HERE ASAP!

  One of the things I love about detective work is you get to see the Hidden World, the spawn and species that normal people spend every resource to avoid. You see the human condition with all the bullshit stripped away, the secret lives people live and the extremes they’ll go to to protect what they’ve got or to grab for some dream of pride or love or money, or just another twenty-four hours to keep drawing breath. You, the cop, tread in this hell without being part of it. Your shield protects you. At least you think it does. I tell myself, tramping out of Little Hong Kong, Look around you, Dewey. Every poor bastard in this place is fucked, and you, without your badge, could and probably would be one of them.

  Back out finally into the blistering sun, I tap the Find Me app on my phone and Manning and I are reeled in digitally, across a fifty-acre parking lot, to our AV.

  What have we learned from this morning’s expedition?

  Our mystery woman sent the lamed-vav text and made the follow-up call.

  We don’t know who she is or where she lives, if she in fact lives anywhere, except that . . .

  She is off the grid, invisible, and . . .

  She’s tech-savvy.

  We have also learned, incidentally, that “lamed vav” has something to do with the Jewish legend of the Thirty-Six Righteous Men, whatever the hell that is.

  Is this Manning’s assessment? What is he thinking? I turn to him as his gaze settles on the Bank of New York time-and-temp display across the neck of the bay in Canarsie.

  MANNING

  April nineteenth and it’s a hundred and fourteen in the shade.

  BOOK TWO

  LAMED VAV

  9

  THE DAKOTA

  I DON’T KNOW WHY I worry so much about Manning. Technically he’s not even my boss. Like everyone else in DivSix, I work for Gleason. Gleason is the one I should be sucking up to.

  Manning doesn’t even particularly like me. Sometimes when he’s phrasing an order or an instruction to me, I can tell he’s forgotten my name. He’s running some mnemonic in his head; I can practically see the wheels turning behind his eyes.

  Do I like him? Does it matter? I respect him. By miles he’s the savviest detective in the division. Any junior with ambition would kill to be in my place. You want to be around Manning just to see how his mind works.

  Driving back from Little Hong Kong, Manning gives me an assignment—what he calls an “interpretive.” I’m to find out everything I can about the legend of the Thirty-Six Righteous Men. Where does it come from? What does it mean? What did the sweatshop boss mean when he said, “When they’re gone, God destroys everything”?

  And I’m to dig into the backgrounds of the four victims, including the two from Russia, with this question in mind:

  Could they in any sense be considered “righteous”?

  What Manning wants to know in legend terms is, What does “righteous” mean?

  MANNING

  Is it religious? Ethical? What qualities, specifically moral qualities, do the victims have in common?

  Manning instructs me to keep
my mind open. Don’t “pre-load.” Follow where the facts, and your instincts, lead you.

  Another of Manning’s mantras is, “Pay attention to your unconscious.”

  My first week working with him, only a few days after he had rejoined the division, he said, “Let’s go to a movie.” I couldn’t believe he was serious. We went in the middle of the day to the Beacon at Forty-Second and Eighth, a revival house. The film was Double Indemnity. I’d heard of it but never seen it. It was damn good. On the sidewalk afterward (no sit-down dinners or tête-à-têtes with Manning) he asks me what I took from the picture. I stammer something moronic.

  MANNING

  The “little man.”

  In the movie Edward G. Robinson plays an insurance investigator. He refers repeatedly to the “little man in the center of my chest,” who always knows more than he himself about any investigation he’s conducting.

  Manning’s inner world, if my own little man is any judge, is about nothing but pain. He’s buried in it. It lives in his cells twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know the source and I don’t want to know.

  But I do worry.

  The day ends. Manning exits without a word to anyone. I stay at my desk, finishing notes and reports for the day.

  Manning is walking home from the office now. I know his route exactly because I’ve had to track him down half a dozen times on orders from Gleason or Silver, when Manning has walked out early or just bolted at day’s end when there were still division meetings on the calendar.

  DivSix’s headquarters are at West Sixty-Eighth and Amsterdam Avenue, in the new city-owned complex two long blocks from the Hudson. Leaving there, Manning walks up to Seventy-Second and hikes east in all weathers. He never takes a bus or a cab, never calls for an Uber or a self-driver, and won’t ride the subway even in a blizzard. He stops for an Old-Fashioned at Crosby’s on Seventy-Second and Columbus Avenue, early, six or six-thirty, when the sun is still high in the summer.