The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Are you sure these guys aren’t Christians?’

  ‘I know; it’s weird isn’t it? There’s some serious debate going on about that, in fact. There are plenty of Jews who say Crown Heights is effectively taking itself outside Judaism, that it is becoming another faith. The argument is that Christianity was once just a form of Judaism which believed the Messiah had come; now Crown Heights is making the same move.’

  ‘The difference is they’re still waiting. Mind you, Christians are still waiting for the second coming. Everybody’s waiting.’

  This lot certainly are. They’re waiting for their leader to reveal himself, for him to rise from the dead and tell them it’s all going to be OK.’

  ‘You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?’

  ‘Kind of. Look, theologically speaking, they might be right. It is quite true that, in the Messianic age, Judaism says the dead will live again. And there’s nothing written that says the Messiah can’t be one of them; you know, one of the dead. So they might be right. It’s just, I don’t know, it just seems kind of sad to me. Like this is a group of children who’ve lost their daddy or something. As the therapists would say, “they’re hurting”.’

  Will tried to square TC’s account — a cult traumatized by the loss of their leader, stirring themselves to a Friday night fury as if desperately summoning him back from the dead with the gang who had nearly killed him a few hours earlier. He found sympathy did not come easily. ‘How come you know so much about them?’

  ‘I read the papers,’ she said quickly; an instant scold. ‘It’s all been in the Times.’

  Will kicked himself. His haste at Tom’s meant he never did the thorough Google search that would have told him all this — or at least that the Rebbe was dead. More galling was the certain knowledge that all this had, just as TC said, been in the paper but that he had skimmed over it: weirdo religious news, not relevant.

  That was last night. This morning’s thunderbolt came once he finally found the phone charger, near the coffee pot. He plugged it in and his mobile came silently to life. (He always set his to ‘silent’: you never knew when a loud, synthetic chime would embarrass you.) The voicemail messages declared themselves first: four from his dad, three, increasingly sarcastic ones from Harden, the last saying, ‘You better be on a story so good that I win a Pulitzer for running it,’ before telling him he would be on ‘the first boat back to Oxford’ if he did not report for duty soon. Two others that Will skipped after a few words, deeming them non-urgent.

  Next came the texts. One from Tom, wishing him luck.

  And then:

  Foot runs. B Gates.

  He pressed the button marked ‘Details’ but the phone yielded nothing. For number, it said ‘Withheld Private Caller’. For the time, it uselessly gave the hour, minute and second Will had switched on the phone. He had no idea who had sent it or when. Given that the meaning was utterly opaque, that made the blank complete.

  By now, TC was up, emerging from her mini-bedroom with a sleepy stretch. Even in man’s-style boxer shorts and a thin strapped white vest, she looked sumptuous. The navel ring was fully exposed now. Will felt a tremor of movement in his groin, followed by a thump of guilt. To lust after your ex girlfriend was appalling under any circumstances. To do so when your wife was a hostage in fear of her life was contemptible. He gave TC only the merest acknowledgement, looked back at his cell phone and reflexively tucked in his pelvis — as if to staunch the flow of erection-threatening blood before it passed the point of no return.

  To his relief, TC kept some spare clothes behind the partition and she now disappeared to put them on. When she emerged, Will handed her his phone. ‘Now this,’ he said.

  TC fumbled for her glasses; it was too early for lenses.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, staring at the words.

  Will briefed her on his early lines of inquiry. ‘I reckon this must be from them, the Hassidim. They obviously got my number off the phone when they had my bag.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t have done that. It breaks Shabbat. And they wouldn’t send a text message for the same reason. Both violate the Sabbath.’

  ‘What, and dunking an innocent man into freezing water is OK?’

  ‘Technically, yes. They didn’t use any electricity, any fire. They didn’t write anything down, didn’t use any machinery.’

  ‘So what they did to me was all perfectly kosher.’

  ‘Look, Will, don’t give me a hard time. I don’t make up these rules. All I’m saying is, they would only break the Sabbath if there was no alternative. So far they avoided that.’

  ‘But what about pikuach nefesh, you know the saving a soul thing?’

  ‘You’re right. If they felt it was justified, they would do it.

  OK, so it could be them. What does it mean?’

  ‘Like I know. But I was wondering if perhaps foot means ending or conclusion. You know how you told me Rosh Hashana means literally “head of the year” so maybe foot is the end.’ Will smiled hopefully, like a pupil expecting praise. TC did not smile.

  ‘And runs?’

  ‘You know, “it goes on”. It runs on. Or “the end approaches”.

  Maybe Foot runs is a coded way of saying that the operation is nearing its end. And the B Gates thing is just a sign off.

  You know, Bill Gates. Mickey Mouse.’

  TC did not react. She just took the phone over to the couch, sat down and stared at it. ‘Can you pass me the pad? And a pen.’

  Will sat next to her, so he could see what she was doing. He felt awkward as soon as he had done it; his legs so near hers.

  She was writing down a new message.

  GPPU SVOT

  ‘OK, so that doesn’t work. Let’s try it the other way.’

  ENNS QTMR

  ‘Nor does that,’ she said, not disappointed so much as challenged.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s kiddie code-breaking stuff. Each letter stands for the one after it — so that F is really G, O is really P — or, alternatively, the one before it — so that F is really E and O is really N. That way foot is either gppu or enns. Which means that neither of those is the code. Let’s try another one.’

  TC began to write, very fast, the alphabet across the page.

  Then, underneath it, she did the same in reverse, so that Z, Y, X, appeared directly under A, B, C.

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A

  ‘Now we can read off and see what we get.’ Her finger scanned along the line, then she started scribbling.

  ULLG IFMH

  ‘Shit,’ Will hissed. ‘I am getting so tired of these fucking games. What the hell does this mean?’

  ‘We’re not thinking logically. Not many people send text messages by phone like this.’

  ‘Brits do.’

  ‘Yeah, but most Americans don’t. And it would have been just as easy to communicate by email. But they didn’t do that. Why not?’

  ‘Because they know that we can trace their emails. They must know that I worked out where their last one came from.’

  ‘Sure, but that might not be a bad thing from their point of view. They might want you to know it was a message from them. No, I reckon they chose a different method for a reason.

  Can you pass me your phone?’

  She grabbed it eagerly, instantly finding the messaging programme. She hit ‘Create message’ and began typing with her thumbs. Will had to huddle even closer to see what she was doing. He could smell her hair and had to fight the urge not to breathe deeply: in an instant, her scent had carried him back to those long hot afternoons together.

  That in turn jogged another sense memory, the perfume of Beth. He liked it best when it was strongest: when she dressed up to go out for the evening. She might have got her outfit just right; he would want to rip it all off, to ravish her there and then. Later, at the party, he would spot her across the room and find hims
elf looking at his watch: he wanted to get her back home. He was suddenly flooded with memories, of TC and of Beth, and they were arousing him. He felt confused.

  TC was typing the word FOOT. Now her thumbs searched for the * button; she pressed it twice, and a smile began to form around her lips. The display changed, showing the word FOOT, then font then don’t, then enou, then emot, then donu and finally ennu before going back to foot. TC wrote down the word don’t.

  Next she keyed in RUNS, which showed up on the screen as SUMS, SUNS, PUNS, STOP, RUMP, SUMP, PUMP, as well as STOR, SUNR and QUOR. She wrote one of those down, too.

  ‘There,’ she said, with the satisfaction of a bookish schoolgirl who had just completed her algebra homework in record time. The two-word nonsense of FOOT RUNS now appeared as a clear message of encouragement.

  DON’T STOP.

  It was not really a code at all, thought Will. Just a neat use of the ‘predictive’ language function on most cell phones: every time you tried to punch in a word, the phone offered possible alternatives using the same combination of buttons. You pressed 3,6,6,8 to mean FOOT, but you might have meant DON’T so the machine cleverly offered you that option. Whoever sent this message had found a novel use for the function.

  The satisfaction of TC’s handiwork was brief. True, they had decoded the message, but they hardly knew what it meant and they still had no idea who had sent it.

  ‘So who the hell is Bill Gates?’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said TC, picking up the phone again.

  ‘Well, B could be C or A.’ She keyed in the word GATES. ‘And that could be HATES or HAVES or HAVER or HATER.’

  ‘So what would that mean?’ said Will. ‘A hater? A hater of what? Or is it B Haves as in “behaves”?’

  ‘Or maybe it’s the opposite of “a hater”,’ said TC, suddenly excited.

  ‘The opposite?’

  ‘The opposite of a hater. A friend.’

  ‘But it doesn’t say that. It’s just gates or hates or haves or hates.’

  ‘Or haver. Haver is the word for friend in Hebrew. B Gates is A Haver. This message says, “Don’t stop, a friend.”‘ She began circling, staring at the floor. ‘Who would want to stiffen your resolve now? Who would think there was a chance you would give up?’

  ‘The only people who even know about this are you, my father, Tom and the Hassidim themselves.’

  ‘You’re sure there’s no one else. No one who’s aware this is happening?’

  With a stab, Will thought of Harden and the office: he would have to do something about that eventually.

  ‘No. No one knows. And since neither you, nor Tom, nor my Dad need to contact me anonymously that leaves the Hassidim. I think we may have a bit of a split on our hands.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Will enjoyed the novelty of TC being a pace behind him for once. Politics never was her strongest suit.

  ‘A split. A split in the ranks of the enemy. The only person who could have sent this would be somebody who heard the Rebbe, I mean the rabbi I spoke to yesterday, telling me to back off. They must want me to ignore that advice. They must disagree with what the rabbi’s doing. This person doesn’t want me to stop. And I think I can guess who it is.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Saturday, 8.10am, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

  These days he came down to check only once a week. The Secret Chamber now seemed to run itself, needing only the lightest supervision. These visits of his were less practical than sentimental: it gave him pleasure to see his little invention working so well.

  He had designed things before of course. Down at the docks, he had come up with a new roll-on, roll-off method for unloading the boats that came in from Latin America and went on to the US. He had not planned it this way, but his new system was said to have revolutionized the country’s drugs trade. He had only been trying to improve the efficiency of import-export. But thanks to him, cocaine could come in from Colombia and be bound for Miami with the shortest possible turnaround. From there, and in a matter of hours, the parcels of white powder would spider out to America’s cities — Chicago, Detroit, New York. Haiti’s drugs bosses boasted that if ten lines of coke were snorted into the nostrils of a US citizen at any given moment, it was certain that at least one had passed through Port-au-Prince.

  In his social circle, that gave Jean-Claude Paul prestige.

  Among the well-heeled dollar millionaires of Petionville, each in their armour-fenced, high-walled villas, no one fussed too much as to the ethical origins of one’s wealth. That you could drive a Mercedes and send your wife to Paris to replenish her wardrobe and re-tint her highlights was enough. When the Americans invaded in 1994 they called the mansion dwellers of Petionville MREs — morally repugnant elites — and Jean-Claude was classed among them.

  Maybe that was why his brain had come up with the Secret Chamber, as a way to make amends. He could not imagine where else the idea could have come from: it seemed to arrive in his head fully formed, nothing to do with him.

  The chamber was, in fact, a single-storey building, painted white. It looked like a glorified hut, no more noticeable than a bus shelter. Crucially, there were entrances on all four sides which were open at all times.

  The system was simple. At any moment, the rich could come in and leave money inside the chamber. And, also at any moment, the poor could come in and take what they needed.

  The beauty of it was its anonymity. The doors operated on an automatic-locking system that ensured only one person could be inside the chamber at any one time. That way a giver and a receiver were guaranteed never to meet. The wealthy would not know who had benefited from their largesse; the deprived would not know who had helped them.

  Port-au-Prince’s well-off would not get the chance either to lord it over their beneficiaries or to judge them insufficiently needy. And the city’s impoverished would be spared the sense of indebtedness that can make charity so humiliating.

  The four doors were the finishing touch. It meant that there could never arise, not even informally, a givers’ entrance or a receivers’ entrance; it was too random for that. And so, if you saw someone walking in or out, you had no idea what kind of errand they were on.

  There was only one more thing Jean-Claude had to do to make it work. He had to exploit a Haitian national trait, one that applied as much to the SUV-drivers of Petionville as the searingly poor of Cite Soleil: superstition.

  He spoke to the healers and voodoo priests whose writ ran among the MREs, slipping a few dollars to those with a knack for spreading the word. Before long the wealthiest folk in Port-au-Prince came to believe that they would be cursed if they did not visit the Secret Chamber and do the right thing.

  So Jean-Claude smiled as he stood inside the chamber now, looking at a bowl filled with US dollars as well as local currency and even the odd item of jewellery. Those outside assumed he was another visitor; his own role in setting up the chamber had remained unknown to all but the handful of holy men whose PR skills he had enlisted.

  He was picking up a discarded food wrapper from the floor when the lights flickered and went off. With all four doors closed, the room was now in complete darkness. Jean-Claude silently cursed the electric company.

  But it did not stay dark for long. Someone struck a match, just behind him. The power failure must have short-circuited the automatic locks, allowing this man to gain access.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Only one at a time, that’s the rule.’

  ‘I know the rule, Monsieur Paul.’ The voice was unfamiliar; speaking French not Creole.

  ‘Well, perhaps I’ll leave and then you can do what you need to do.’

  ‘For that I need you here.’

  ‘No, no. It’s all private and confidential, my friend. That’s why we call this the Secret Chamber. It’s secret.’

  The match had burned out now, shrouding the chamber once more in perfect black.

  ‘Hello? Are you still here?’

  There
was no answer. Not a sound, in fact, until the gasp of Jean-Claude’s own breath as he felt two strong hands on his neck. He wanted to protest, to ask what he had done wrong, to explain that this man could take all the money he needed — there were no restrictions, no maximum. But the air would not come. He was rasping, a sandy, dry exhalation that barely sounded human. His leg was trembling, his hand clinging onto the forearm of this man who was strangling him.

  But it was no good; darkness came upon darkness. He slumped to the floor. The stranger lit a new match, crouched down and closed the dead man’s eyes. He murmured a short prayer, then straightened himself up and shook the dust off his clothes. He headed for the door he had used to come in, taking care to reconnect the circuit he had broken a few minutes earlier. And then he stepped out into the night, anonymous and unseen, just as Jean-Claude Paul had intended.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday, 8.49am, Manhattan

  When they talked in the night TC had not been that interested in Yosef Yitzhok. She was focused on the rabbi and on everything that happened inside the classroom and later at the mikve. Now, though, she trained the full beam of her intellect on the encounter that had concluded Will’s brief and unhappy stay at Crown Heights.

  ‘You’re wrong about one thing,’ she told Will rapidly. It doesn’t make sense for Yosef Yitzhok to have brought in the paper just to make the point that you work for The New York Times, and therefore they’ve got to be careful. They already knew you worked for the Times. They sent that very first email to your Times address. That much they had worked out. So as soon as they realized you were not Tom Mitchell but were Will Monroe, they knew exactly who they were dealing with. Beth’s husband. A reporter for the Times.’

  ‘So why did they have a copy of my story laid out? Why had Yosef thingy brought it in?’

  ‘You don’t know he brought it in. Might have been in there throughout.’