by Sam Bourne
In his current mood, Will found even this news depressing.
It was confirmation on a grander scale of everything the last twenty-four hours had been saying. You could trust no one; everyone was up to no good. Then, as if to reproach himself, he thought of Howard Macrae and Pat Baxter. They had both done something good — but they were the exceptions.
'Will, listen.'
TO had turned the volume all the way up. Will recognized the voice: WNYC's anchor, giving the local news.
'Interpol have made a rare trip to Brooklyn this morning, with the mainly Hassidic neighbourhood of Crown Heights the scene.
Officials from the NYPD say they are working with police from Thailand on a murder inquiry. NYPD spokesperson Lisa Roderiguet says the case relates to the discovery in the Hassidic sect's Bangkok centre of the body of a leading Thai businessman.
He'd been missing for several days, believed kidnapped. The rabbi in charge of the Bangkok centre is now under arrest and the Thai authorities requested, via Interpol, that the NYPD investigate the world headquarters of the Hassidic movement, here in New York, to further their inquiries.
'The weather: in Manhattan, another chilly day…'
TO looked pale. 'I need to get out of here,' she said suddenly.
She seemed choked, claustrophobic. She moved across the room, picking up essentials — purse, phone — until Will realized this was not a negotiation. They were leaving. Watching her frightened him. There was no mistaking TO's reaction: she thought Beth had either been murdered or was about to be. He had not realized it, but TO's earlier calmness, almost insouciance, had been a comfort as well as an irritant.
Now, with TO slamming the steel concertina door of the elevator after her, jabbing the buttons to make the damn thing go faster, he was robbed of that illusion. He felt his palms grow damp: while he had been dicking around playing amateur sleuth, his beloved Beth, his partner in life, might have been strangled or drowned or shot… His eyes closed in dread. More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.
They were outside, TO grabbing him by the wrist, not so much walking alongside him as leading him, like a mother escorting a reluctant child to nursery. 'Where are we going?' he asked.
'We're going to play them at their own game. See how they like it.'
They had only walked a couple of blocks when she strode into NetZone, an internet cafe which actually served coffee.
There were copies of The New York Times, including the Sunday magazine and Arts and Leisure section, traditionally released twenty-four hours in advance, piled up invitingly by the fashionably shabby arm chairs. The Internet Hot Spot on Eastern Parkway felt very far away.
TO was not here to sip cappuccino. She was on a mission, first handing cash over and then planting Will at a free terminal.
'OK, log on.'
Will suddenly remembered what going out with TO had been like. He had always felt as if he were somehow the junior partner and she the person in charge. He used to think that was because she was the native New Yorker while he was the outsider, that he deferred to her because she knew her way around what was for him a foreign land. But he had been in America for six years now and she was still at it. He realized TO was plain bossy. 'Hold on,' he said. 'Let's talk about this first. What exactly are you suggesting I do?'
'Log on to your email and I'll show you.'
'Why do we have to do this here? Why don't we just use the BlackBerry?'
'Because I can't think using my thumbs. Now come on.
Log on.'
He relented, typing in the string of letters that enabled Times staffers to access their email remotely. Name, password and he was in: his inbox. There were no surprises, just the same list of messages he had already seen on his BlackBerry.
'Where's the last message from the kidnappers?'
Will scrolled down until he found it, the string of garble in the 'name' field and the subject: Beth. He opened it, seeing the unblinking words anew.
WE DO NOT WANT MONEY
The news from Thailand made this sentence look positively cruel. If it was not money they were after, what motivated them: the simple, sick pleasure of killing? Will could feel his blood rising, in anger — and desperation.
'OK, hit Reply.'
Will did as he was told, before TO nudged him aside and shared the seat with him, so that their bodies touched from their knees to their shoulders. She grabbed the keyboard and began two-finger typing furiously.
I am on to you. I know you must be guilty of what happened in Bangkok because I know you are doing the same here in New York. I plan to go to the police and tell them what I know. That will implicate you in at least two very serious crimes, to say nothing of your assault and false imprisonment of me. You have till nine pm tonight to give me my wife back. Otherwise I talk.
Will read the words twice over, stopping once to look at TO whose face stayed fixed on the computer screen. Her profile was just inches away from his, a minute diamond stud sparkling in her nose. He had seen this face from this angle so many times before; it seemed strange not to be kissing it.
'Christ,' he said eventually. 'That's pretty strong.' He wondered if it was too explicit, mentioning his treatment the previous night. He remembered a slew of recent trials, in the US and in Britain, where journalists' emails had been produced. What would they make of this one, issuing direct threats and proposing obstruction of justice — and all from a New York Times address? Fuck it, was all he could think. His wife was in dire danger; anything was permitted. TO's note was sharp and hit the target directly. He was about to press Send when something caught his eye.
'Why till nine pm? Why's that the deadline?'
'They might not read this till after the Sabbath is finished; we've got to give them time to reply.'
The insanity of the situation had not faded with time. The notion of pious killers, happy to murder but queasy about turning on a computer before the appointed hour was too bizarre for Will to get used to. TO had explained that the Sabbath did not officially conclude until a specific minute on Saturday evening. Nothing so imprecise as 'sunset' or 'once it's dark'. It was 7.42pm. If you did not have a watch, you could check by looking outside your window: tradition held that once you could see three stars, you knew the Sabbath was over and the normal working week had resumed.
Will had no idea how the Hassidim would respond. TO had moved so fast, her desire for action meshing perfectly with his fury at the kidnappers who, he now knew, were capable of murder, that he had barely thought through the consequences of what they had just done. Surely these were strange, unpredictable people; who knew how they would react? Will's tone of angry defiance might push them over the edge: they could decide this was provocation enough to finish Beth off. They could kill her and it would be his fault — for following the whim of, of all people, his ex-girlfriend. He imagined the pain of future years, learning to live with such a weight of guilt.
And yet, what had he got to lose? Playing nice had brought no results. He had to get their attention, force them to realize that there would be a price to pay for killing Beth. This email told them they needed his silence — and that they should spare her life to buy it.
Besides, it felt good to be fighting back. He recalled how he had felt the previous evening, when he immersed himself in the warm water of the pre-sabbath mikve as Sandy stood close by. He had been ashamed of his nakedness, his willingness to strip himself bare to ingratiate himself with men whom he should have fought as enemies. Well, now he was clothed and pulling himself up to his full height and taking them on. With this message, he was fighting for his wife and acting like a man.
He pressed Send.
'Good,' said TO, giving Will's thigh a firm squeeze. 'Good job.'
TO's elation was infectious; for Will it translated into relief.
He had done something at last; he had made his move.
The urge to fall into one of the cafe's roomy armchairs was strong; Will was exhausted. But TO was already chivvying him to get up and ou
t. She was not just edgy, Will realized; she was making a calculation. Of course. TO was worried that Will himself could be a target for the Hassidim. If she had had her initial doubts, now she was convinced: the men of Crown Heights were not to be messed around. It was the news from Bangkok that converted her. Once a sceptic, she was now a believer.
As they left, Will's mobile stirred. He waited till they were outside before he even looked at it: DadHome. Poor guy, he'd been calling for hours and Will had not sent him so much as a text message.
'Hello?'
'Thank God for that. Oh Will, I've been worried sick.'
'I'm fine. I'm exhausted, but I'm OK.'
'What the hell's been happening? I've wanted so much to call the police, but didn't dare until you and I at least had a chance to talk. Really, Will, I was this close — but I held off.
It's such a relief to hear your voice.'
'You haven't told anyone have you? Dad?'
'Of course I haven't. But I've wanted to. Just tell me, have you heard from Beth?'
'No. But I know where she is and I know who's got her.'
TO was gesturing at Will's phone, then wagging her finger across her face like a school mistress. Will got the message.
'Dad, maybe we should talk about this when I'm on a landline. Can I call you later?'
'No, you have to tell me now! I'm going out of my mind here. Where is she?'
'She's in New York. She's in Brooklyn.'
Will instantly regretted his revelation. Cell phones were notoriously leaky: he knew that much from the scanners on the Metro desk, where police radio transmissions were easier to get than NPR. For those who knew how, plucking cellular calls out of the air was a breeze.
'But, Dad, I'm serious. There can be no vigilante rescue attempts here. No calls to the police commissioner who you knew at Yale. I mean it: that would truly fuck everything up and could cost Beth her life.' His voice was wobbling. Will could not tell if he was about to scream at his father or break down and cry. 'Promise me, Dad. You're not going to do anything. Promise.'
His father gave a reply but Will could not hear it. A word went missing, drowned out by the sound of a beep on the line.
'OK, Dad, I'm going to say goodbye. We'll speak later.'
There was no time for niceties; he needed his father off the line so he could take this incoming call.
Will pressed the buttons as. fast as he could, his thumbs trembling with tiredness, but there was no call. The beep he had heard had announced instead the arrival of a text message.
Will could feel TO leaning on his upper arm, straining to see his phone as they stood together on the street.
'Read message?' the phone asked dumbly. Of course I want to read it, idiot! Will hit the Yes button, but found the keypad was locked. Damn. More buttons to press, forcing him to go the long way around, choosing text messages then his inbox, then a long wait while the display promised that it was 'opening folder'. Finally, the message appeared: five words, short, simple — and utterly mysterious.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Saturday, 11.37am, Manhattan
2 down: Moses to Bond Now that TO had broken the code, this message was not baffling — he knew it would be solved within a few moments — but it was frightening. This string of nonsense might be about to tell him anything. What if one of those words translated as Beth?
TO grabbed the phone and began punching numbers, only to stop suddenly. '2 could be A or B or C. But the only alternative for "down" is "down". It must be a different system.'
'It's a crossword clue.'
'What?'
'2 Down. You know, 4 Across, 3 Down. It's a crossword clue.'
'All right. So what's moses to bond? It implies some sort of motion: we're meant to take Moses to Bond somehow.
But what the hell is Bond anyway?'
'James Bond? Could be a number. You know, 007.' TO looked blank. 'Maybe it's two down from seven. Which would be five.'
'Which could be the five books of Moses. But that's not much of a clue. Listen, I'm cold.' They were still standing on the street. 'There.' She pointed at a McDonalds.
With a bacon breakfast bun in one hand and a pencil in the other, TO was scribbling — combinations of letters and numbers.
'What about Bond Street?' said Will, pacing around her.
'Take Moses to Bond Street?'
TO looked up at Will, her eyebrows raised.
'OK, OK.'
'Let's think this through,' she said, scoring a long line through everything she had written down. 'What did you say in your reply to him?' Will, his mouth now full, froze just as his hands were about to claw a clump of fries. 'I didn't.'
'Sorry?'
'I meant to. I was about to. But then we heard the news from Bangkok and everything got forgotten.'
Will was almost waiting for TO to pick him up on that lapse into what she used to call the cowardly passive. 'Everything got forgotten,' was the cowardly way of saying that Will himself had forgotten. (TO coined the term in honour of an old flatmate who, despairing at the state of the kitchen they shared, but too meek to accuse TO directly, announced, 'Dishes have been left.' Hence, and thereafter, the cowardly passive.) That thought brought back a memory Will had not dredged up for years: the alternative grammar he and TO had devised to reflect the way language was really used, the way emotions really worked. There was, of course, the passive aggressive and, Will's favourite, the past too-perfect, deployed by those consumed with nostalgia. The pressure caused by gift-giving, particularly pronounced at Christmas, was, inevitably, present tension. We must have been so obnoxious, thought Will now, reconstructing in his mind the world of smart-aleck, private jokes that he and TO had once inhabited together.
'Well, that makes this even more intriguing,' TO said, letting Will off despite his error. 'It's not a reply. It's a second message, sent voluntarily. It suggests Yosef Yitzhok felt a degree of urgency: two messages in one morning.'
'The first one could have been last night. But, OK. Why would this be urgent? 'I don't know.' TO's voice had dropped; she was distracted.
She had grabbed Will's phone back and was staring at it, taking occasional slurps from her chocolate shake without once breaking her gaze. She broke from the meditation only to murmur, 'He was in a hurry.' She began tapping the keypad, then scribbling, then tapping again. A small smile of satisfaction, followed by a crinkled brow.
There. She shoved the sheet of paper across the table.
TWO DOWN. MORE'S TO COME.
They both stared in silence, the pleasure derived from the act of decoding now giving way to the pain of further bemusement.
'He's playing games with us,' said Will. '"Right, you've deciphered two of my messages; I'll send more". So long as we do… what?'
'We need to let him know we understand, but we need more information. We don't want to piss him off. If he's trying to help, we need to keep him happy. Send a message back.'
Will took the phone, glancing up at TO with eyes that said, 'I hope you're right about this.'
Thank you. I won't stop. And I want to hear more. Can you tell me anything? Please.
All they could do now was wait. TO was convinced that McDonalds made a sufficiently anonymous hiding place. Will suspected there was another motive: TO did not want Will in her home.
But they had to wait somewhere. If the Hassidim were not going to reply till sundown, or when the three stars appeared, or whatever way these jokers had of telling the time, there was nothing else to do — save waiting for Yosef Yitzhok to give them another tantalizing, veiled message.
It came nearly an hour later, at first sight as nonsensical as the others.
Wet nose debugs rooro This time Will pressed the buttons, jotting the results instantly onto his pad. By the time he got to the third word he felt his stomach churn. TO was craning to look and once she saw the notepad, she gasped.
Vet more deaths soon
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Saturday, 11.53am, Manhatt
an
Everyone was either staring at them directly or pretending not to look. TO was attempting to calm Will who had just pounded the table and then thrown a cup of coffee at the wall. A cleaner had appeared with a mop.
'We've got to try and think straight,' TO was saying.
'How can I think straight? It's a fucking death threat.'
'He might be trying to warn us.'
'Warn us? He's saying they're going to kill Beth.' Will looked up, his eyes red.
The phone buzzed again. TO grabbed it first, before Will had a chance. For the first time, a straight sentence.
He who hesitates is lost TO looked at it for only a second, before trying out the text alternative. It made no sense. No, she concluded, this was a different kind of clue. Maybe it was not even a clue.
Perhaps it was merely a warning. Hurry, there is no time to waste. She turned the display to Will for his inspection. It somehow calmed him: there was no direct menace here. It sounded more like a call to action.
TO peered at it a while, then wrote it down on the top page of her sketchpad, just below the first three messages.
Will saw that she had neatly written the first, coded version on the left and then the second, deciphered one on the right.
For an instant, Will imagined TO at school: the kind of girl who always kept a clean, well-stocked pencil case.
While TO chewed her pen and did her best to stare the latest riddle into submission, Will tried to while away the afternoon. He picked at junk food, bit his nails, drummed his fingers on the table; tried reading the paper but could not concentrate. He could hear a couple arguing. 'I don't believe you,' the woman was saying to the man. The instant he heard the words, he sat bolt upright, remembering that night in the Carnegie Deli. Beth had said a beautiful sentence to him without irony, even if he had tried to pierce the moment with a joke. 'I believe in you and me,' she had said. He suddenly wished he had repeated the words back to Beth.
For it was true. She was his faith.
The cell phone beeped.
He that knows nothing doubts nothing This time Will read it out loud. He knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway: 'Did you work out the first one, "He who hesitates is lost"?'