The Righteous Men (2006) (15 page)

‘Convert,’ he explained concisely, his voice rising to be heard
above the din. ‘Judaism doesn’t exactly encourage conversion, but
when it happens the Rebbe is really welcoming. Much more than most Jews. He
says any newcomer is as good as someone born Jewish, maybe even better because
they chose to be a Jew—’

Will missed the rest, as he was squeezed between two men pressing forward,
part of a large, surging huddle which, without cue or instruction, was now
turning. The children seemed to be pointing the way. Several boys, who could
not have been more than eight years old, were on their fathers’ shoulders,
waving their fists in the same direction, again and again. They looked like
underage football hooligans, pointing the finger at a reviled ref. But they
were not looking at a person. Their energies were directed instead at a throne.

That was the word that came to mind, without prompting.

It was a large chair, covered in plush red velvet. In a Spartan room like
this, it stood out as an item of lavish luxury. There was no doubt, this seat
was being venerated.

Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu v’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach Volam va’ed.

The crowd were singing this one line, over and over, with a fervour Will
found both exhilarating and terrifying. He leaned into Sandy’s ear,
shouting to be heard. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Long live our master, our teacher, the Rebbe, King Messiah forever
and ever.’

Messiah. Of course. That’s what this word daubed everywhere meant.
Moshiach
was Messiah. How could he have been so slow? These people regarded their Rebbe
as nothing less than the Messiah.

Now Will was desperate to raise himself to full height, to see above the
crowd who were all staring so intently at the throne, their voices hoarse with
anticipation. Surely the Rebbe would make his entrance any second now, though
how his followers would top their current levels of ecstasy to mark his
arrival, Will could not imagine.

The noise was becoming deafening. Will tried to find Sandy’s ear
again, but he had been shoved forward in the melee.

Will’s face was now uncomfortably close to a different man, who smiled
at him, recognizing the humour of their sudden intimacy. What the hell, thought
Will.

‘Excuse me, can you tell me, when does the Rebbe come in? When does
everything begin?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘When does everything begin?’

At that moment and before the man had a chance to respond, Will felt a hand
clamp tightly on his shoulder. In his ear, a deep, baritone voice.

‘For you, my friend, it all ends right here.’

T
he hand left his shoulder
only to be replaced by two more on each of his arms. He was flanked by two men
who he guessed were no older than twenty but were both taller, and stronger,
than him. One had a reddish beard, the other just a few wisps of chin hair.
Both looked straight ahead as they frogmarched him away through the crowd. Will
was too shocked to shout; no one would have heard him anyway. In the crush, he
knew people would barely take a second look at a trio of men jammed together,
especially since two of them were now singing along with enthusiasm.

He was being led away from the throne, back towards the library area, where
the crowds were marginally thinner. Will was no good at guessing numbers —
not enough experience covering demos — but he reckoned this room must
have had two or three thousand people crammed into it, all of them chanting so
furiously that his captors could have killed him there and then and nobody
would have noticed.

Suddenly his handlers turned behind some shelves and down a narrow, scuffed
corridor. The redbeard opened one door, then another until finally they were in
what seemed to be a small classroom: more of those dark-wood benches and
tables, more shelves lined with leather books, whose titles were in
gold-lettered Hebrew. He was deposited firmly in a stiff, plastic chair in the
middle of the room, the Hassidic heavies planting him to the spot by taking a shoulder
each.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Will said
weakly.

‘What’s going on here? Who are you?’

‘Wait.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘I said wait. Our teacher will be here soon. You can talk to him.’

The Rebbe. At last.

The noise from next door was still throbbing. Maybe the Rebbe had finally
made his entrance; perhaps he was working the room before he came in here to
work over Will. The clamour was certainly thumpingly loud; the ground was moving
like the walls of a club, shaken by bass. But whether it had suddenly got
louder, as if the Rebbe had arrived while Will was dragged out of the room, he
could not tell.

‘OK, let us begin.’

That same baritone voice, again from behind. Will tried to turn around, but
the hands came down to clamp his shoulders tight.

‘What’s your name?’

Tom Mitchell.’

‘Welcome Tom and good
shabbos
. Tell me, why do we have the
pleasure of your company in Crown Heights?’

‘I’m here to write a story for New York magazine about the Hassidic
community. It’s for a new slot: “Slice of the Apple”.’

‘Cute. And why have you come here this weekend of all weekends?’

‘They only commissioned me to do it this week so I came the first
weekend I could.’

‘You didn’t call ahead, you didn’t want to make an
arrangement maybe?’

‘I just wanted to look around.’

‘See how the natives live in their natural habitat?’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ Will croaked. The force of
two men pressing their hands down on his shoulders was starting to take its
toll. ‘I hope I’m not being rude, but why are you holding me like
this?’

‘You know, Mr Mitchell, I’m glad you asked me that because I
wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression of Crown Heights or its
people. We welcome guests here, we really do.

We invite visitors into our homes. We are not even hostile to the press;
reporters have come here often. We have had no less than The
New York Times
pay us an occasional visit.

No, the reason for this,’ he paused, ‘unusual reception is that I
don’t believe you’re telling us the truth.’

‘But I am a reporter. That is the truth.’

‘No, the truth, Mr Mitchell, is that somebody has been prying into
what is strictly our business and I am wondering if that somebody is you.’
The voice, briefly raised, paused to recover its equilibrium. ‘Let’s
relax a bit, shall we? It’s
shabbos
, we’ve all had a hard
week. We’ve worked hard. Now we rest.

So let’s take it slow and calm down. Back to my question.

You’ve been talking to Shimon Shmuel for a while, so I’m sure
you’ve picked up a few things about our customs already.’

They’ve been following me.

‘You’re an intelligent man. You’ve realized by now that observance
of the Sabbath is one of our strictest rules.’

Will said nothing.

‘Mr Mitchell?’

‘Yes, I understand that.’

‘You know we are forbidden from carrying on the Sabbath, don’t
you?’

‘Yes, Sandy told me. Shimon Shmuel.’ He regretted that late
addition of Sandy’s Hebrew name: it sounded like an attempt at
ingratiation.

‘He may not have mentioned that on the Sabbath, we are forbidden to
carry but not only to carry: we are also barred from using electricity of any
kind. The lights that are on now were switched on before
shabbos
began
and they will stay on all day until after
shabbos
ends tomorrow night.
Those are the rules: no Jew is allowed to turn them on or off. Moreover, you’ll
have noticed that there were no cameras out there just now. And there have
never been cameras out there, not on
shabbos
. What you saw just now has
never been photographed or filmed. Never, and that’s not through lack of
requests. Do you see where I’m heading, Mr Mitchell?’

Now that he had heard the voice speaking for longer, he began to form a
picture of the speaker. He was an American, but his accent was not the same as
Sandy’s. It was more, what, European? Something. Will could not quite
identify what it was: certainly more New York, almost musical. It contained a
kind of shrug, a recognition of the absurdity of life, sometimes comic, usually
tragic. In split, fractional seconds he saw the face of Mel Brooks and heard
the voice of Leonard Cohen. He still had no idea what the man speaking to him looked
like.

‘Mr Mitchell, I need to know whether you understand what I’m
saying.’

‘No, I don’t have a camera, if that’s what you’re
asking.’

‘As it happens, I wasn’t thinking about that. More on the lines
of a recording device.’

Again, Will was in the clear. Despite his age, he did things the
old-fashioned way: notebook and pen. This was not down to some technophobic
Luddism on his part, but sheer laziness.

Transcribing recordings was just too much hassle: you did an interview for
half an hour, then spent an hour writing it up.

The mini-disc recorder was saved only for set-piece interviews where every
word was likely to count: mayors, police chiefs, that kind of thing. Otherwise
he opted for paper and ink.

‘No, I haven’t recorded anyone. But why would it be a problem—’

He suddenly felt himself jerked forward and then up, the darker, younger man
at his left side apparently taking the lead. The pair of them had looped their
arms under Will’s armpits and levered him upward, ensuring he did not
turn around. Next, the dark man swung around to face him, avoiding Will’s
eye while he first stretched Will’s arms up and out, then reached under
his jacket, moving his hands over Will’s shirt, around his back and under
his armpits. He was like a zealous airport security guard.

Of course.
Recording device
. They weren’t looking for a reporter’s
Dictaphone. They were looking for a wire. They were worried that he was the
police or the FBI. Of course they were: they were kidnappers and they feared
Will was an undercover cop. The questions he had been asking, the snooping
around with no warning.

‘No wire,’ the dark man was saying, in an accent that confirmed
him as at least Middle Eastern if not Israeli.

‘But there is this.’ It was the redbeard, whose task during this
two-man body search, which had continued up and down Will’s legs when it
was not focused on his back, had been to examine the captive’s every
pocket — including the one on the inside left of his jacket. His secrets
offered little resistance: his Moleskine notebook always made a neat bulge in
his left breast pocket. Redbeard took it out and offered it to the unseen hand
behind. Will, shoved back down into his seat, could hear the pages being turned.

The blood seemed to drain from him. His mind rewound back to Sandy’s
house, when his host urged him to leave his bag behind. And Will thought he was
being so clever. He had left his bag behind all right — but only after he
had slipped out his notebook and zipped his wallet into what he liked to think
was a concealed compartment. He had not wanted Sara Leah prying. Now the book
was in the Rebbe’s hands. What a fool!

Will girded himself for the explosion. The longer the silence lasted,
punctuated only by the sound of turned pages, the slicker the moisture on Will’s
palms.

His mind was racing, trying to remember what was in that book that might
give him away. Luckily, he was not organized enough to have written his own
name on the first page or anywhere else. Walton did that, a neat inscription on
the cover of each pad he used. Some reporters even used those nerdy address
labels. On that score at least, Will was saved by his own inefficiency.

But what about the reams of words inside, including the copious notes he had
taken today, right here in Crown Heights? Maybe those would be OK; they would
at least confirm his Tom Mitchell cover story. But had he not scribbled down
all that computer stuff at Tom’s earlier? Surely he had written down
something about the kidnappers’ email?

The seconds lurched by, like a record playing at the wrong, too-slow speed.
A hope took root. Could it be that his bastard shorthand, his unique
speedwriting scrawl, was about to rescue him? He had developed this hybrid
non-system of note-taking first at Columbia and then at the
Record
. It
worked for him, though he always feared the day he was asked to produce notes
for the editor, or worse still a judge in court.

He imagined a defamation trial, turning on the accuracy of his written
account of a conversation. He would need teams of graphologists to verify that
he was as good as his words.

The upside, at least at this moment, was that Will knew his notes would be
all but indecipherable.

‘You’ve broken our rules, Mr Mitchell. I don’t mean our rules,
as in us, the people of Crown Heights. What do we matter in the great scheme of
things? We are ants! But you’ve broken HaShem’s rules.’

A sentence surfaced that instant in Will’s head.
Thou shalt not
bear false witness
. It was, Will realized, as if he was the mere recipient
of the thought rather than its source, one of the ten commandments. He knew that
Jews and Christians had those in common — and that was surely what the
Rebbe had in mind. This was the preamble to an accusation of lying.

He was undone.

‘I think you know that we’re serious about these rules: no carrying
on the Sabbath. No carrying. No wallets, no keys.

No notebooks.’

‘Yes.’

‘We take these rules very seriously, Tom. They apply to our guests as
much as they apply to us. I’m sure you understand that. Yet here you are,
with a notebook.’

‘Yes, but that’s the only thing I took. I left the rest of the stuff
behind; I left my bag.’ Will was addressing a book case: his interrogator
was behind him, his captors at his side.