The righteous men

by Sam Bourne

  The exchange ended; the Rebbe seemed to have gone.

  Redbeard, Moshe Menachem, now left his sentry position at Will's side and stood in front of him. His eyes were sheepish as he handed to Will the bag he had left at Shimon Shmuel's.

  I'm sorry about, you know, before,' he mumbled.

  Will took the bag, seeing that his notebook had been put back inside, too. His phone was still there, and his BlackBerry, untouched. He took out his wallet, faintly curious to see which stub or ticket had given him away. It was as he expected, full of anonymous cab receipts. He opened up the series of slots made to carry credit cards, a feature he never used. In one, a book of standard US postage stamps; in another, a business card of a long-forgotten interviewee. In the third, a passport sized photograph — of Beth.

  A bitter smile passed across Will's face: it was his bride who had betrayed him. Of course they would recognize her. She had given him this picture about six weeks after they met; it was summer and they had spent the afternoon boating off Sag Harbor. They passed a photo booth and she could not resist: she mugged for the automated camera there and then.

  Will turned the picture over and there it was, the message which had left no doubt. love you, Will Monroe!

  Will looked up, his eyes wet. Before him was a new face; he guessed it was the man who had briefly clashed with the Rebbe a few moments ago. His face was soft and round, his cheeks chipmunk-full, framed by a jet-black beard. He was tubby, with a round head atop a round tummy. Will guessed he was in his early twenties.

  'Come, I'll show you out.'

  As Will got up, he saw at last the chair where the Rebbe had sat during the inquisition. It was no throne, just a chair.

  Next to it was a side table, the kind a lecturer might use to keep his notes and a glass of water. What was on it made Will jolt.

  It was a copy of that day's New York Times, folded, very deliberately, to highlight Will's story about the life and death of Pat Baxter. So that was what the round-faced man had shown the Rebbe; that was what they had argued about. Will could guess what the young man had been saying: This guy's from The New York Times. He's never going to keep this quiet. We should keep him here, where he can't shoot his mouth off.

  By now they were outside, Will holding the clean white shirt the Hassidim had given him but which he was not yet wearing: he had not wanted to undress in front of his inquisitors.

  He had been humiliated enough already.

  They stood on the street, outside the shul. Men were still coming in and walking out. Will looked at his watch: 10.20pm.

  It felt like three am.

  'I can only repeat our apologies about what happened in there.'

  Yeah, yeah, thought Will. Save it for the judge when I sue your Hassidic asses for false imprisonment, assault, battery and the whole fucking shebang. 'Well, better than an apology would actually be an explanation.'

  'I can't give you that, but I can give you a word of advice.'

  He looked around, as if making sure that he was not being watched or overheard. 'My name is Yosef Yitzhok. I work to bring the Rebbe's word into the world. Listen, I know what you do and here's my suggestion.' He lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. 'If you want to know what's going on, think about your work.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'You will. But you have to look to your work. Go on, leave.'

  This Yosef Yitzhok seemed agitated. 'Remember what I said. Look to your work.'

  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.r />
  '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 s
till 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.