The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Well, that makes this even more intriguing,’ TC 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.’ TC’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 TC 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. TC was convinced that McDonalds made a sufficiently anonymous hiding place. Will suspected there was another motive: TC 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 room

  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. TC was craning to look and once she saw the notepad, she gasped.

  Yet more deaths soon

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Saturday, 11.53am, Manhattan

  Everyone was either staring at them directly or pretending not to look. TC 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,’ TC 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. TC grabbed it first, before Will had a chance. For the first time, a straight sentence.

  He who hesitates is lost

  TC 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.

  TC 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 TC at school: the kind of girl who always kept a clean, well-stocked pencil case.

  While TC 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”?’

  ‘Not yet. He that knows nothing doubts nothing. What could that mean?’ TC was pencilling the words down, in the corner of a page already marked with drawings.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Will said, chiefly for the sake of saying something. ‘It’s a contradiction. In the first message, he’s telling us not to hesitate. Just to get on with it. Now he’s saying that it’s good to doubt. You know, only a moron doesn’t experience doubt.’

  ‘Doubting’s not the same as hesitating.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know. I’m trying to think. He wants to tell us something. You know, “move it”. Or “think things through”. I don’t know. But he sounds like he wants to help.’

  ‘No. If he was trying to help he wouldn’t be talking in fucking riddles.’ Another beep.

  Opportunity seldom knocks twice

  As soon as Will read it out, TC began murmuring. ‘Twice is interesting. Perhaps he’s telling us to multiply something.

  Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe he wants us to look at the letters as numbers!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, like the way text messages work, only reversed. They’re letters and words formed from numbers. Maybe this is the reverse. We’re meant to take the letters and think of them as numbers.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, one thing could be to count the number of letters in each clue. That number could be significant. Or perhaps each letter has a numeric value. You know, A is one, B is two.’

  Will was baffled, but TC was ignoring him. She was scribbling away frantically on her sketchpad, wildly computing one sum after another.

  More beeping; perhaps a minute after the previous one.

  A friend in need is a friend indeed

  Will was becoming more irritated with each message. If this was help, why did it have to be so damned opaque? Will felt like shaking young Yosef Yitzhok by his lapels: If you want to help, then just help! ‘What is this, Cliché Night? A friend in need is a friend indeed. What the hell is that? How on earth does he expect us to solve these so fast?’

  ‘Look, cool down Will. Right now this is all we have. He’s all we have. Maybe he’s suddenly in a place where he can text without being seen; he might want to get all his messages out while he can.’

  It was plausible; Will bit his lip. He did not want to set off a whole row with TC now, not while she was concentrating so hard on her role as unofficial cryptographer.

  Will began to pace around, letting his pores fill up with the fat and grease of a burger joint — which this place was, even if it did now sell salads. He strode into a seating area where a single TV monitor was playing. Set to NY 1, the local news channel, it now flashed pictures of the Bangkok arrest of a Brooklyn rabbi on murder charges. The suspect was in the trademark garb — beard, white shirt, black suit, trilby hat — as he was handcuffed and led away by two young and scowling Thai policemen. His face seemed to be determinedly aimed downward, in shame or to avoid recognition, Will could not tell. Altogether, the sight could not have been more incongruous. That sequence was followed by footage of NYPD officers arriving on foot in Crown Heights, eschewing their usual squad cars in a gesture of ‘sensitivity’ apparently ordered by the mayor’s office.

  Those pictures renewed an argument Will and TC staged several times that long afternoon.
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  ‘I should go back there, right now.’

  ‘And do what? Get dunked again?’

  ‘No. I would tell them what I, what you, wrote in that email. That I know what they’re up to and that they should cut a deal.’

  ‘Too risky., You might say just the wrong thing and escalate the whole situation. The virtue of email was that we could control exactly what was said.’ Was said, the cowardly passive again. TC was obviously reluctant to admit that she had put those words in Will’s mouth.

  ‘I can’t just leave Beth there. Who knows what they might do now that they’re under siege. They might panic. One of those thugs could tighten the screw a bit too hard, or keep her head in water ten seconds too long—’

  ‘You’re doing it again. Getting into a panic. I told you, this is like climbing a mountain: you mustn’t look down. You mustn’t think about any of that. Besides, the place is crawling with police today: they wouldn’t dare do anything while they’re around. The whole vibe of those text messages from Yosef Yitzhok is that everything’s still to play for. Nothing has changed, nothing terrible has happened.’

  ‘Except you don’t think they’re from Yosef Yitzhok.’

  ‘I’m not sure, that’s all.’

  That’s how it went, several times over, ending inconclusively with both TC and Will falling into a sullen or drained silence. Afterwards, Will would reflect on the fact that Beth and he never bickered. They argued but never bickered; he and TC had turned it into an Olympic sport.

  Interruption came whenever a message landed. These texts, which once made Will’s chest pound with nervous anticipation, were becoming routine. Even boring. Will clicked to see the latest.

  To the victor the spoils

  That sounded menacing, as if the Hassidim were registering a claim on Beth: if we win, we will keep her. Will felt his hatred rising. ‘Now they’re threatening us.’

  ‘To the victor the spoils,’ TC repeated slowly once Will had read it out, as if she were taking dictation.

  Will glimpsed what looked like a grid on TC’s sketch pad, neatly filled in with each new line from YY. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘The numbers things didn’t work out, so I’ve been looking at anagrams for each one. And I can get something but nothing that hangs together. There’s no pattern. I’ve tried running it as an acrostic—’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An acrostic. Where the first letter of each sentence provides a letter of the hidden word. You know, “Roses are red” gives you R, “Violets are blue” gives you V. There are some psalms laid out like that. Put together the first letter of each line and you get another line of prayer. It was a trick: a twelve-line poem with an invisible thirteenth line.’

  ‘I get it. So what do we get if we do that?’

  ‘So far? We have H, H, O, A, T. If we skip the indefinite article — so it’s “Friend in need” not “A friend in need” — we get H, H, O, F, T. Not much better.’

  ‘What the hell is he playing at? Hang on.’ Another one was coming through.

  Goodness is better than beauty

  Will was beginning to feel swamped. TC was having to think like a grandmaster at one of those chess exhibitions, moving around the room, playing a hundred games on a hundred different boards at once. It had taken a long time to decode just one message. Now she had six.

  ‘Look, Will. There’s no way to work out what this is till it stops. Whenever I try one theory, it’s blown out by the next message. We need to have the full set and then see what this guy’s trying to say.’

  ‘YY.’

  ‘If it’s him, yes.’

  ‘Who the fuck else could it be?’

  ‘Leave me alone, Will.’

  He couldn’t blame her for being exasperated. He knew he was being insufferable, taking out his rage, grief and sheer fatigue on her. She didn’t have to take this from him. She could walk away — and he would be stranded.

  He wanted to say sorry, but it was too late. She had turned her back on him, wisely preventing any escalation in hostilities.

  Pity neither of them had ever been so shrewd when they were lovers.

  No more than two minutes later, another message arrived:

  A man is known by the company he keeps

  Was this some way of urging Will to think about the people around the rabbi who had interrogated him last night? Forget about him, start thinking about his henchmen. Was that what this clue was trying to say?

  And then, perhaps thirty seconds later:

  From little acorns mighty oaks grow

  Christ, this guy was annoying. What was this, some oblique reference to fathers and sons? The effort he was putting into these messages, hammering out long texts when all he had to do was send a few, simple words: the address where Beth was held. The ire was rising through Will’s body, reaching the veins in his neck.

  He had not even shown TC the latest message when he began texting back:

  Enough of these horseshit games. You know what I need.

  The instant he had sent it, Will regretted it. What if he scared Yosef Yitzhok off? TC was right: he was all they had.

  Worse, what if Will’s message was somehow intercepted by the Crown Heights hardliners, who would instantly realize what YY was up to, that he was in communication with the enemy, and punish him? Will imagined YY in an alleyway, just off Eastern Parkway, huddled over his cell phone, maybe using his prayer shawl as a canopy, when two men grab him from behind, snatch away his phone and drag him off for an impromptu meeting with the rabbi.

  And yet, Will felt a release of cathartic energy flow through him. He could not stand the passivity of his situation, sitting there, hands outstretched, waiting for clues to fall like crumbs from the Hassidim’s table. It felt good to fight back.

  Finally, the sky began to darken. Will started pacing, his right hand gripping the BlackBerry, turning it clammy. At 7.42pm exactly TC nodded, telling him that the Sabbath had now ended. Will glanced down immediately, expecting a red light to flicker on within seconds. No, no, advised TC: they should give it at least thirty minutes before expecting a reply. There were things to do after the sabbath, including the Havdalah ceremony which used wine, spices and a plaited candle to bid a final farewell to the day of rest. Then there was the walk back from synagogue to make Havdalah at home. Most men would probably want to freshen up after that. Even if the Hassidim read Will’s message on a computer in a home or office, they would not want to reply from there: too traceable. Not by Will of course, but by the police in some future investigation. So they would have to go back to the Internet Hot Spot — all of which could take at least an hour. Even this scenario was optimistic, TC warned. Will knew he had sent them an email, but they did not. They were not expecting one, so why would they rush to check?

  On the other hand, maybe today was different. Crown Heights was crawling with detectives investigating a murder under instruction from Interpol. The rabbi who had grilled Will would not be able to stick to his usual ritual. He would be answering questions and they would not be about the correct dimensions of a Talmudic stove. He would be under interrogation — and under pressure. (The thought of that role reversal pleased Will.) If that was the atmosphere, Will reckoned they would have a hundred reasons to check email as soon as they could. Even if they were not waiting for word from him, they would need to communicate with their people in Bangkok. Will guessed they would be powering up their laptops the moment it was theologically decent.

  At eight o’clock Will’s hunch was confirmed. Twenty minutes after sundown, the red light on his BlackBerry blinked. Will clicked the track wheel and saw that same, hieroglyphic script, the characters he now knew to be Hebrew. Re: Beth.

  You are out of your depth. Do not drown.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Saturday, 8.01pm, Manhattan

  He had no time for a seminar with TC. He replied instantly, his thumbs working furiously.

  I could call the police right now. What do I have to lose?

>   He waited, while TC sat opposite him, curled into a ball, rocking herself backward and forward. Will wondered if he had ever seen her in this position, so nervous she was foetal.

  The crowd at McDonalds had changed. The bums and homeless mutterers now mostly replaced by twenty-something men about to fuel up before a night hitting the bars. The red light came on.

  You have everything to lose. You could lose her.

  Again, Will did not wait. This, he realized, was what he had wanted since that first message: a direct confrontation with the kidnappers. When they had met last night, Will was pretending to be someone else. He had had to be polite. Now it was out in the open, he could take them on.

  You touch her and you will be guilty of two murders. My evidence will send you down. Release her or I start nailing you.

  The delay was longer this time, excruciating. The red light flashed, Will pouncing on the little blue machine.

  Low price pharmacy for all your medical needs. We deliver. Spam.

  More minutes and then:

  Call now on 718-943-7770. Do not use a recording device. We will know if you try.

  Will imagined how this was working at the other end. Doubtless, one of the monkeys, Moshe Menachem or Tzvi Yehuda, was at the Internet Hot Spot, reading and typing the emails, taking direct instruction from the boss on the end of a phone. Now the boss had something to say that he did not want committed to email, even one as disguised as this. Good, thought Will, sensing his opponent was weakening a little. He looked at TC: having consumed her nails, she was now gnawing at her cuticles.

  He pulled out his cell phone, dialling the number slowly, as if he was performing surgery. His hands were trembling. He realized that this man frightened him.

  It rang only once. He could hear the phone had been answered but no one spoke: he was going to have make the first move.