The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, John? This is Will Monroe from the Metro desk. Is this a bad time?’

  ‘I’ve just been up for about thirty-six hours and I’m about to file a story, Why would it be a bad time? How can I help?’

  ‘Sorry, I’ll try to keep it really brief. I know you’re liaising with Terry Walton, so I don’t want to cut across anything he’s doing—’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘But I’m working on a piece at this end—’ Terrible lie, and one that Bishop could so easily expose, but Will figured he was up to his neck already, a few more inches would not make much difference. ‘I’m trying to get more of a handle on the victim. Mr Sangsuk.’

  ‘Mr Samak. His name was Samak Sangsuk. In Thailand, the family name comes first; you know, like Mao Tse-Tung. Anyway, I filed all that already. Foreign will have it.’

  Shit. Should have asked Andy to send everything over first.

  ‘I know and that’s all great. It’s just a bit of a steer I’ve been getting from some of the Hassidim here.’

  ‘Oh, yes? That’s great, Will. What’s the steer?’ The tone had changed. The prospect of useful information always improved journalists’ manners.

  ‘I know this sounds odd, but I’ve been told to look closely at the victim’s biography.’

  ‘Just some rich guy. In business.’

  ‘Well, I know. But my informer—’ a notch above “source” and therefore much more tantalizing ‘—suggests if we dig a bit deeper, we might find something useful. And relevant.’

  ‘What, was he a crook? There’s a ton of corruption in this town. That wouldn’t be news.’

  Now Will would have to take his chance. ‘No, what I hear is the opposite. I’m told that if we look hard enough, we’ll find something very unusual about this man — and I don’t mean unusually corrupt.’

  ‘Well, what do you mean? What “very unusual” thing will we find?’

  ‘I don’t know, John. I’m just telling you what the Hassidim told me. Look for it, and it will explain everything. That’s what my guy said. Just wanted to pass the tip on.’

  ‘It’s ten o’clock.’

  ‘I know. But maybe some relatives of the victim, of Mr Samak, are still awake? Perhaps his friends?’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of numbers I can call. I’ll file whatever I get to foreign.’

  They said goodbye and Will let out a lungful of air in relief.

  Now he was wasting senior foreign correspondents’ time. He would be back at the Bergen Record within a week. If they would have him …

  He phoned Andy, instructing him to email any new files from Bishop the second they came in. He had no idea what the Times’s man in Bangkok would find out.

  ‘Well, thanks for breakfast.’

  ‘Shit, sorry. I’ve been on the phone.’ TC was holding a piece of paper. ‘Have you done it?’

  She showed him. It just said fOrtV.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘At first I thought it was just a typing error. But this guy is very neat and precise. Everything is deliberate.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s emphasized two letters: the second and the fifth.

  I started trying to say it out loud. I thought maybe it was “forty O-Y” but that makes no sense.’

  ‘TC—’

  ‘Anyway, it’s even simpler. It’s forty, second and fifth. Or, put another way, 42nd and 5th.’

  ‘That’s the public library.’

  ‘Exactly, which means—’

  Suddenly TC tensed up. Will looked round. His father had come in, wearing Sunday morning chinos.

  ‘Is there some news?’

  ‘Yeah, we just got another text message. Sending us to the public library.’

  ‘Is this man suggesting he meet you there? Be careful, William, please.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t said anything yet. Just the address. Forty second and fifth. That’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘Well, let me at least give you a ride to the station.’

  There was another buzz. Another message.

  Dare to be a Daniel.

  Will showed it to his father and then to TC.

  ‘Oh, I think I know what that is,’ said his father, a matter of seconds later. ‘What did Daniel do?’

  ‘He entered the lions’ den.’

  ‘And the New York Public Library—’

  ‘—is guarded by two lions. Of course. The statues.’

  ‘Patience and Fortitude. That’s what they’re called. Maybe that’s what he’s saying you need.’

  ‘No, I think it’s simpler than that.’ It was TC. ‘I think he’s just saying go into the library. Dare to be a Daniel, enter the lions’ den. That’s it.’

  The phone buzzed once more.

  1 New Message

  Will fumbled to press the right buttons. All three of them were watching and waiting.

  Primers’ domain discovered in the orchard of fruit

  ‘Christ. What the hell’s that? Just when I thought we were getting somewhere.’

  ‘It’s worded like a crossword clue. Or perhaps there’s a room in the library that has a painting of an orchard?’

  ‘TC, what do you reckon?’

  ‘Your father’s right. It’s a cryptic crossword clue. But I can’t quite see—’

  ‘Come,’ said Monroe Sr, calling a halt to proceedings. ‘You can make the next train if you hurry.’

  Once on board, Will watched as TC got to work. She bit her nails, then twitched her leg, before finally stroking her eyebrow with her right index finger, over and over. She borrowed Will’s notebook and made a series of scribbled attempts at codebreaking — trying to write the words backwards, forwards and broken up into pieces. Nothing.

  Occasionally she broke off for more of the conversation that had consumed them since their unscheduled reunion on Friday night. They tried to untie the logical knot which events and the succession of riddles had handed them. They went back and forth, trying to tease out any clues they might have missed, again and again.

  Finally, as they clattered past Flatbush Avenue and Forest Hills, TC had a breakthrough.

  ‘It works like a clue for those crosswords I used to like doing whenever you bought the British papers.’ Will had a fleeting memory of the two of them in his college room, lazing away a Sunday morning. ‘When it says “discovered in”, that’s code for an anagram. Like when they say “messed up” or “hidden in”. So the fruit orchard is somehow “discovered in” primers’ domain.’

  ‘In those two words?’

  ‘Yep. Primers’ domain is an anagram.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For Pardes Rimonim. It means “Garden of Pomegranates” in Hebrew; an orchard of fruit.’ She was smiling.

  ‘OK, but what on earth is it?’

  ‘We’re about to find out.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sunday, 2.23pm, Manhattan

  Patience and Fortitude were gazing elsewhere, as always. Apparently uninterested either in the volumes of learning behind them or the hordes of knowledge-seekers marching towards them, they maintained their poses: stone sentries, silent guardians of the house of wisdom.

  Will had always loved this building. As with all young men, the discovery of his own conservatism had come as a shock. But shortly after his arrival in America, Will found he had a great affection — no, it was more than that — a need for old buildings. He was more English than he realized: he needed the solidity of aged walls and stones. He had grown up in a country where the most unremarkable village boasted a church that was six, seven, eight hundred years old — if not older. When it was all around him, he had barely noticed it. But now, in a country that was still so new and unformed, the absence of such agedness almost made him feel queasy, like a sailor on an unsteady ship.

  New York was different. Like Boston or Philadelphia, it had enough mature masonry to reassure Will. And the Public Library was a perfect example, a structure that could have been p
lucked from London or Oxford and dropped onto Manhattan island from the air.

  On their way in, Will’s phone had buzzed once more. The message: 3 tines I kiss the page. It seemed obvious that this was the final instruction they needed. Pardes Rimonim was the name of the book, that much TC had worked out. This was telling them where to look, perhaps even the page.

  TC fairly galloped up the two flights of stairs to the Dorot Jewish Division. She told the librarian which book she wanted to see, prompting a sharp intake of breath. ‘You mean the 1591 manuscript of Pardes Rimonim?’ TC and Will looked at each other. ‘You do appreciate that that is an extremely rare and precious book. Only the manager of the reading room or her deputy is authorized to bring out that manuscript. Could you come back tomorrow?’

  ‘I really need to see it right away.’

  ‘I’m afraid a book such as this needs special permission.

  I’m sorry.’

  ‘Who’s that woman there? The one drinking coffee.’ TC was nodding towards a back office.

  ‘That’s the deputy manager. This is her lunch break.’

  ‘Hello! Hello!’

  Will could have cringed with embarrassment. TC had all but shoved the librarian aside and was leaning across the counter, shouting and waving to catch the deputy manager’s attention — here, in the solemn quiet of a library. Scholars at the reading room’s five tables were craning to see the cause of the commotion. If only to restore order, the woman in the back office put down her mug of coffee and came over.

  It worked. TC was asked to write her name and address in the visitors’ book, fill in a form and leave ID. Still huffing, the woman disappeared to retrieve the manuscript from a locked cabinet inside a locked room — twenty long minutes in which Will paced, studying the faces of the weekend researchers all around him.

  ‘Here it is,’ said the woman eventually, standing over the table where Will and TC had pitched camp. She did not hand them the book, nor did she lay it on the table. Instead she propped it up on a pair of wedge-shaped black Styrofoam blocks, so that the spine did not fully open. TC pulled out her notepad and reached for a pen.

  ‘Pencils only, I’m afraid. No pens near a book of this quality.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Pencils it is. Thanks very much. I’m sure we won’t be too long.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right next to this book until it’s back in its cabinet. Those are the rules.’

  TC began turning the pages with slow deliberation. The manuscript was a relic from a vanished era; hand-crafted in Cracow, its pages were thick with four centuries of history. TC was wary even of touching it.

  Will sat at her side, staring at the latest text message.

  Mindful of the woman watching over them, he whispered, ‘Is that some religious thing, to kiss the page?’

  ‘Jews do kiss their prayer books when they’re closed, or if they drop them on the floor. But not three times. And not specific pages.’ TC was speaking without looking away from the book. She seemed to be in awe of it.

  Will took out his notepad. Maybe this was an exercise in mathematics; perhaps if it was expressed as arithmetic. Will wrote ‘3 times’ as ‘3 x’. Perhaps I was the figure 1. What would that give him? 3 x 1 = 3. No good.

  Then he took a second look at what he had written. Hold on. Will’s mind suddenly went back to the Wednesday afternoons he had spent as a nine-year-old boy, in Mr McGregor’s Latin class. McGregor was an old-school schoolmaster, all black gown and hurling the blackboard eraser, but every word he taught had stuck. Including the games he used to play with the Lower Remove to teach Roman numerals.

  Hurriedly now Will wrote out ‘3 times’ as three x’s in succession: xxx. Now for ‘I kiss’. Of course. The I was an i. And how did you denote a kiss, except with the letter x? (For only a flash, Will remembered the first time Beth signed off a text message with an x. Just one x, after her name, but it thrilled Will. They were in that brief, delicious overture of a relationship, falling in love, but not yet having said the L-word out loud. That x of Beth’s was a taster.) Now he wrote it out: xxx for ‘3 times’, ix for ‘I kiss’: xxxix.

  “Turn to page thirty-nine.’

  TC was slow, handling the text before her with solemn care. Will wanted to tear at the pages so that he could just see whatever they were meant to see right now.

  ‘OK,’ said TC finally. ‘This is it.’

  Before them was a page dominated by a graphic: ten circles arranged in geometric fashion and linked by a complex series of lines. Will had a faint memory of such drawings and it took him a while to place it. This reminded him of the chemistry textbooks of his youth, depicting molecular structures in two dimensions.

  Except each circle had a word written inside it. Will had to squint to see that the script was Hebrew. It was jarring, geometry and scientific neatness in a drawing that was medieval.

  ‘What are we looking at?’

  He could see TC did not want to answer. She was hunched over the image, her shoulder all but blocking Will’s view. ‘I’m not sure yet. I need to look.’

  ‘Come on, TC. I know you know what this is.’ Will was shouting in a whisper. ‘Tell me.’

  Self-consciously, and aware of the hovering librarian, TC started to point and talk. ‘This is the key image of kabbalah.’

  ‘Kabbalah? As in Madonna? Red string and all that?’

  TC rolled her eyes, then moulded her face into an expression that said, where do I start? ‘No. That’s just some bullshit celeb cult. It’s about as close to real kabbalah as, I don’t know, the Easter Bunny is to Christianity. Just listen.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. It’s a very arcane form of Jewish study, closed off to most people. You’re not meant to look at it until you’ve reached the age of forty. And it’s for men only.’

  ‘What about this picture?’

  ‘It’s like the starting point of kabbalah. It contains everything.

  They call it the Tree of Life.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘That’s sort of what they think this is. It’s a diagrammatic representation of the key qualities of God. Each of these circles is a Sefirah, a divine attribute.’ She pointed at the lowest circle.

  ‘See, it starts at the bottom with Malchut, that means Kingdom. That refers to the physical realm. Then it branches off into Yesod, Foundation, Hod, Glory and Nezah, Eternity.

  Then it progresses, into Tiferet, Beauty, Gevurah, Judgment and Hesed, Mercy. And finally, at the top of the tree, there is Binah, which is kind of like intellectual understanding. And on the right, Hochmah, which is Wisdom. And at the summit, Keter, the Crown. Something like the divine essence.’

  ‘So we’re looking at the image of God.’

  ‘Or the closest we’re ever going to get to it.’

  Will could not say anything. A shiver had run down his spine as TC had spoken. Maybe it was all just crankish hokum, but this series of lines and circles, drawn so many hundreds of years ago and taught down the generations only to those deemed able to cope with its secrets, seemed to radiate a kind of power.

  TC spoke again. ‘It’s funny talking about the “image of God”. The mystics believe that the whole reason for existence is that tiod wanted to behold God.’

  Will looked bemused.

  ‘until then, there was just God. Nothing else. Just a limitless, infinite God. The trouble was, there was no room for anything else: there was no room for God’s creation, for the physical world that would mirror him. So he had to shrink a little. He had to contract, leaving a space so that a kind of mirror could exist — to reflect God back to himself. See, it says it here.’ She picked up another book, one she had ordered while waiting for the manuscript, rapidly flicking through the pages until she found what she was looking for.

  ‘until the moment of Zimzutn, contraction, “Face did not gaze upon Face”. God could not see himself.’

  Will was fascinated by this image and even more so by th
e explanation TC was supplying, but he was dispirited by it, too. This was deep theological water: how deep would he and TC have to dive before they found the connection to the here and now, to the Hassidim, to their victims and to Beth?

  Once again, he felt a rising indignation with Yosef Yitzhok.

  Why could he not just give it to them straight?

  It had failed once before, but he decided to try a direct appeal again. While TC pored over the drawing, sometimes cocking her head to one side to read the text on the opposite page, he rummaged in his bag and, away from the prying eyes of the librarian, he texted YY.

  We’re in the library. We see the drawing. We need more.

  He noticed the time on the phone display: 3.30pm. Which meant it was the dead of night in Bangkok. Will looked at the BlackBerry; nothing from the foreign desk.

  ‘Listen,’ he whispered to TC. ‘I’m going outside to call the paper. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘Bring me a soda.’

  As soon as he was out of the main reading room, he started dialling the foreign desk number. Andy picked up before Will got out of the building.

  ‘Yo, Will. How you doing? Shit, I was meant to send you that stuff, wasn’t I? Sorry, been crazy here all afternoon.’

  ‘Andy! I told you I needed it right away!’

  ‘I know, I know. Sorry. I fucked up. Anyway, here it comes.’

  ‘Just read it out to me now, will you? I can’t wait for the BlackBerry.’

  By now Will was outside the main entrance, pacing up and down at the top of that vast staircase.

  ‘Will, we are slightly on deadline here.’ The word was delivered in a mock-English accent; Andy was sending him up, which was a good sign. ‘OK. Here goes. I’ll have to be quick and I’ll skip over the funny names, OK? From John Bishop, Bangkok. Samak Sangsuk was mourned yesterday by those who knew him best — and by a few who hardly knew him at all.

  ‘Mr Samak, who fell victim to what appears to have been an international kidnap plot Saturday, was a member of Thailand’s financial elite, earning top-dollar fees on real estate and through the burgeoning Thai tourist industry.’