The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  Would you murder me to bring about the end of the world?’

  ‘Yes I would, William. I would do it in a heartbeat.’

  Will needed to sit down, to close his eyes. He felt dizzy.

  Suddenly, just on the edge of his field of vision, he could see a haze of movement. It was the woman, charging towards Laser Eyes with some kind of stick: Will realized it was a loose wooden upright, pulled from the banister. With barely a turn, the man aimed his gun directly into the woman’s face.

  He shot twice, sending a cascade of blood and bone across the room. The body slumped to the ground. There was a second or two of silence. And then Will could hear and feel Beth behind him, moaning. His own hands were trembling.

  ‘We need to act fast, William. We cannot tolerate any more delays. The Almighty has designated a time and even a person to take this last step. The time is now and the person is you.’

  Will guessed there could only be a couple of minutes to go. Outside he could hear a chorus of voices, now swelling.

  Avinu Malkeinu Chatmeinu b’sefer chaim…

  Our Father, Our King, seal us in the book of life…

  Even muffled by the walls, the intensity of their plea was unmistakable. He did not understand the words, but he knew their meaning. They were praying, in the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, for salvation.

  The blade was glinting now, as bright and fierce as the flame in his father’s eye. He spoke calmly, but his eyes were on fire. ‘Take this knife, Will and do what is right. Do what God has commanded you. Now is the time.’

  Will glanced at the rabbi, who finally spoke, his voice querulous.

  Will saw his face was splattered with the blood of the woman who had been murdered in front of them. He seemed to be panting. ‘Your father is right, Will. This is the moment for you to act. That is what God himself, in his wisdom, has given to us all: free will. He gives us choice. And now this choice is yours. You must decide what to do.’

  Will gave one last look at his watch. If he could just spin this out a few moments longer …

  But the next second took the decision away. With a cry of ‘Enough talk!’ Laser Eyes aimed his gun towards Will, his eye squinting as he took aim. Will could see that the gunman’s real target was not him at all: he was shooting at Beth and the baby she was carrying.

  Uselessly he held up his hands to cry, ‘No!’ But the word barely came out. Instead, Will felt himself shoved from the side. As he toppled over, he heard first one gunshot, then another — and saw the falling, almost flying, figure of Rabbi Freilich. The rabbi had leapt up and pushed Will out of the way, smothering Beth with his own body. The rabbi had made his own decision: to take the bullets aimed at Will’s unborn son.

  Will seized the moment, charging at Laser Eyes, rushing at his gun hand. The man squeezed the trigger, but he had been knocked off balance: the shot went through the glass of the street-facing window. Will had to get the gun from him. But now he could see his father, the blade bright in his hand, moving towards the corpse of Rabbi Freilich — looking for Beth.

  Finding a strength he had never known, Will was now gripping the assassin’s gun arm, trying to pull it behind his back: the Nelson arm-lock he had learned at school. The man began to squeal, his hold on the weapon weakening. Will got a finger on the handle, but it was not enough. With one eye, he could see his father had nearly pulled Freilich free: in a matter of seconds, he would be able to plunge the knife into Beth.

  Will wanted to pull away from Laser Eyes and stop his father but he knew it would be no good: he would be shot before he had crossed the room. He had to get the gun. He gave one more pull on the man’s arm in a desperate attempt to wrench the pistol away, but it did not work. The gun did not fall from his hand. Instead the assassin instinctively tightened his grip, inadvertently squeezing the trigger.

  Will heard the noise and looked down at his hands, expecting to see them blown away. He was covered in blood but, he realized a second later, it was not his own. Laser Eyes had shot himself in the back.

  Now there was a clear line of sight to his father, who had briefly turned away from his task at the sound of the gunshot.

  For a moment, Will caught his eye. He turned back, his face flushed, as he finally shoved Freilich’s lifeless body to one side. He raised his knife high, ready for the plunge into Beth’s stomach.

  Will flew at him, the same rugby-tackle motion his father had taught him perhaps twenty years earlier. It knocked the older man down, away from Beth but still with the knife in his hand. Now Will was on top of him, staring straight into his face.

  ‘Get off me, Will,’ he rasped, his neck muscles engorged.

  ‘We have so little time.’ His father’s strength shocked him. It took a supreme effort to keep his arms pinned to the floor; his own wrists were straining. Monroe Sr’s neck was swelling with the effort to throw Will off. And still he kept the knife in his hands.

  Suddenly, Will felt a new pressure. His father was using his knees to spring Will off him and it was working; Will was being pushed back. With one more kick, he threw Will off and jumped to his feet. Still with knife in hand, he took three purposeful strides towards Beth, who was now backed against the side wall.

  Will could see his father draw back his hand, ready at last to stab Beth’s womb. But Beth grabbed Monroe Sr’s wrist with both hands, using all her strength to push it back. The knife hovered for a second — held in suspension by the equal strength of a true believer’s desire to bring about heaven on earth and a mother’s determination to protect her unborn child. The two forces were a match for each other. Will realized he had seen this fire in his wife’s eyes once before: it was the same feral determination he had glimpsed in his dream. Then too Beth had been defending a child from terrible harm.

  Now the man’s greater muscle began to show. His hand was advancing, the knife cutting wild arcs in the air, just in front of Beth’s belly. The blade made contact — scoring a deep gash in the cloth of her skirt.

  Will was filled with a sudden hot burst of adrenalin, the adrenalin of the truly desperate. Staggering towards the slumped body of Laser Eyes, he uncurled the assassin’s fingers, still rigidly gripping the weapon, and wrenched the gun away. Standing parallel with Beth, he aimed precisely at his father’s head and squeezed the trigger.

  EPILOGUE

  Six months later

  Will always liked the office ritual of a cake. A group email would go around the office, or at least one part of it, announcing that someone was marking a birthday, celebrating a landmark anniversary or, most often, leaving.

  These little ceremonies — a speech from the department head, a response from the honoree — always gave Will a warm pleasure. Mainly it was because he was still new enough to the Times to enjoy the sense of membership of a grand old institution — and these occasions ladled out that sentiment by the bucketload.

  ‘Farewell to Terry Walton. 4.45 at the Metro Desk.’ It hardly mattered that Will was no fan of Walton’s; it would still be fun. Not that he had seen him much in the six months since everything happened; Walton had scarcely been around.

  Maybe he was winding down for his retirement or the job running a local paper in Florida or whatever else it was he was going to do next.

  Six months. It felt longer. Everything about that week felt long ago, even far away — as if it had happened on a distant planet or in a different age.

  He had had so many hard conversations, the hardest with Tom, at his bedside, explaining why exactly he had taken a bullet. There was no good reason, Tom had concluded, coolly logical even in the intensive care ward. Just as there was no good reason why the bullet had missed his heart by a few inches, lodging in his shoulder bone instead. ‘If I’d been shorter, I’d be dead,’ Tom had said, woozily. ‘Or do I mean taller? You see what I mean? There is no logical reason for any of it. We live in the absence of reason.’ After that, he had fallen back to sleep.

  TC and Will visited him often in those first few days, b
ut neither of them was guest of honour. That place was reserved for Beth. When she walked in, Tom managed a wide beam, rather than a watery smile. She bent over for a mini-hug and told him he had helped save her life and the life of her child.

  He said: ‘Any time.’

  Will had had to recount the events of that night and that week over and over again. First to detectives and lawyers, explaining that he had killed his father in defence of himself, his wife and his unborn son — an account that was soon born out by forensic examination of the house in Crown Heights and subsequent inquiries into the Church of the Reborn Jesus. The police could also see the terrible fate that had befallen Rabbi Freilich and Rachel Jacobson. Both Will and Beth spent hours reliving that dreadful night, giving statement after statement, until they were exhausted.

  When they were on their own, Beth described how she had been well treated, how Mrs Jacobson had mothered her in that house — constantly apologizing for her captivity, promising that soon all would be explained. Beth had been first scared, then furious and finally desperate to get word to Will that she was safe. But, she said, she never once doubted that she would survive. The Hassidim swore they would not harm her and for a reason she had never quite understood, she believed them.

  So they went together, Will and Beth, to the funerals of Rabbi Freilich and Mrs Jacobson which, following Jewish custom, were held quickly, as soon as the coroner released their bodies. There were huge crowds, perhaps three thousand for Rabbi Freilich, a mighty show of collective grief.

  Only then did Will appreciate Freilich’s position among the Hassidim: he had been their surrogate father, guiding them ever since they had lost their Rebbe.

  A handful of people at the funeral approached Beth, making a small bow of their head as they came close. Will understood they were showing respect not to her or him, but to their unborn child, destined to be one of the lamad vav.

  Will saw a familiar face and he headed over immediately.

  ‘Rabbi Mandelbaum, I need to ask you something.’

  ‘I think I know what you want to ask, William. Perhaps you’ll allow me to give you some advice. Don’t think too deeply about what we discussed that night. It would not be good for you. Or your child.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It does seem as if the Rebbe understood that your son will have a special responsibility, that he is to be one of the righteous men. That is a great honour. But the other matter we discussed, I think this is best left alone.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘I told you that our tradition suggests one of the lamad vav is the candidate to be the Messiah. If the time is right, if mankind is worthy, then that person will be the Messiah. If the time is not right, they will live and die like anyone else.’

  ‘But in the last hours of the Day of Atonement, the child my wife is carrying was the only one left. All the other righteous men had been killed—’

  ‘But now that moment has passed — and the world is still standing. Which means there are thirty-six in the world once more. A new group of tzaddikim. Any one of them could be the candidate.’ Rabbi Mandelbaum gazed deeply into Will’s eyes. ‘Any one of them.’

  ‘You see,’ said Beth, drawing her husband away, ‘we don’t have to dwell on all that. There are other things to think about.’ She had been urging Will not to focus on the distant future but on the immediate past — specifically his father. For she knew that Will would be experiencing a triple trauma.

  First, he had to cope with the shock of what he had done.

  Whatever Freud said about CEdipal fantasies, to kill one’s own father was to shake the psyche to its foundations. Beth warned her husband that he would need years to absorb what he had been through. Second, she said, he was experiencing a son’s grief. No matter how insane the circumstances, Will had lost a parent and he needed to acknowledge that. But third, and perhaps hardest, he had to mourn the father he thought he had known. That man would have been lost even if William Monroe Sr had lived.

  For that man had been a fiction. To the world he had presented a front — the secular judge, the ultimate man of reason — so that no one would ever suspect him of his true beliefs or real intentions. It was a sustained lie, one that was doubtless plotted years in advance. It had cost him dearly, almost certainly denying him the seat on the Supreme Court he coveted so badly. Or, Will thought now, maybe that ambition too was a fraud. Probably such earthly goals meant nothing to his father. He dreamed, it seemed, only of heaven.

  In the days that followed that night in Crown Heights, there was a series of arrests across the globe; missionaries and church activists charged from Darfur to Bangkok — all with connections back to the Church of the Reborn Jesus. The suspect in the Howard Macrae case turned out to be a local pastor who had known the victim for years. In Darwin, Australia the chaplain of a hospice was charged with murdering an aboriginal care assistant. In South Africa, police arrested a former glamour model who had joined the sect once she left the industry: she had killed an AIDS researcher she had picked up on the beach.

  It turned out that only a relatively small group around the man the newspapers now referred to as the Apostle knew of his plot against the righteous men. The movement’s new leadership announced that the doctrine of replacement theology would be ‘under review’, and that they hoped all their members would soon come into line with the ‘majority of the modern Christian family who have only respect and reverence for the validity of Judaism as a path to God’.

  Townsend McDougal issued a statement, declaring that he had cut his links with the Church of the Reborn Jesus nearly a quarter of a century earlier — and that he had no idea that Monroe Sr had maintained his secret involvement. He sent Will a note, with condolences, an apology for the suspension — ‘a hasty decision’ — and a promise that his desk was waiting for him whenever he was ready.

  Will looked at the piles of paper in front of him, still unsorted. The light was flashing on his phone: two messages.

  ‘Hi, Will, it’s Tova. Looking forward to tonight. Tell me if there’s anything you want me to bring.’

  He had forgotten; TC was coming over for dinner. Beth had it all mapped out: she had invited some gorgeous, single doctor from the hospital and two other decoy singles. Will had opposed the move: far too blatant, he had said.

  He wondered how TC would handle such a set-up. Her life had changed as much as his that week. She had been the first person, after the police, to come to the house in the minutes after Yom Kippur was over. She had been calling and texting Will frantically and when she got no response, she had headed straight for Crown Heights. She followed the flashing lights. Later she told Will: ‘I know you were determined to get your wife to meet me, but there must have been an easier way than that.’

  Will had told her to go home and get some rest, but she said no. ‘There are some things I need to do here,’ she said, as they hugged goodbye on the street corner. ‘Some people I need to see.’ Surrounded by police and flashing red lights, Will wished her luck.

  ‘Oh and Will?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I ask you to do something for me? I’ve been thinking.

  I’m not really Tova Chaya any more. And TC doesn’t really sound like me either. Too much like a disguise. So. Will you call me Tova?’

  Six months ago.

  ‘OK, people, listen up.’ It was Harden, snapping the newsroom to attention and Will out of his daydream. ‘It’s time to boot out of the door one of our number, so please gather round in loving memory of Terence Walton!’

  Soon thirty or so people were huddled around the Metro desk as Harden offered a galloped tour of Walton’s career on the Times.

  ‘Well, you gotta hand it to this guy for sheer versatility.

  He’s done just about every job on this paper: police reporter, City Hall reporter, business desk, National editor, Delhi correspondent — you name it, Walton’s done it. Would you believe that for two years, this guy edited the puzzle sectio
n at the back of the magazine? Even wrote the goddamned crossword clues. Well, now he has decided that he has had enough of our fair city and is going to share his talents with the good people of India. He’s off to train journalists there so that they can pick up all his bad habits. But we’re grateful to him and so, let’s all raise a paper plate laden with cheap cake and say, To Terry!’

  ‘To Terry!’ they chorused, followed rapidly by the demand for a speech. Walton obliged with a roll call of former colleagues, many long since gone and unknown to Will, and a few barbed jokes at the management’s expense. Finally, he began to wrap it up.

  ‘Well, if my Yale education taught me anything, it’s better a short address than a long lecture. And, as the good book says, “brothers, time is short”. I fly to Delhi this very night.

  So I’ll conclude. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege …’

  The room broke into warm applause; even Amy Woodstein allowed herself a little cheer — though maybe that was just relief to see Walton gone. Will tucked into his cake, shook hands and wished his desk-neighbour all the best.

  Maybe it was the reference to Yale that did it, but five minutes later Will was seized by a thought. He sat back at the computer, still nibbling at the icing on the carrot cake.

  He typed in Church of the Reborn Jesus, scrolled and clicked until he found the talkboard with the picture showing the Rev Jim Johnson and his acolytes.

  Now Will’s eye went straight to his father. So serious, even then. Will’s eye shot across to Townsend McDougal and then, methodically, started at the right of the back row. Face, face, face …

  He increased the magnification on the image. There he was, in the middle row, four away from McDougal. With long, hippy hair he was almost unrecognizable: Will had certainly glided right past him the first time he had looked.

  But the supercilious smile was unchanged: Terence Walton.

  Suddenly a shiver ran across Will’s shoulders. He could hear Walton’s voice from just a few moments ago: As the good book says, ‘brothers, time is short’. He knew it was familiar: it was the message the texter had sent when Will was in jail, from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.