The Righteous Men (2006) (33 page)

Will had heard enough. He hung up and galloped down the stairs, enjoying the
sun on his face. First, Macrae, then Baxter and now Samak. Not just good men,
but unusually, strangely good men. This was no longer a coincidence.

He found a store, bought a couple of bottles of iced tea and headed back up
towards the library: he would have to tell TC the news and work out the
connection with the drawing. Surely, this was about to slot together.

Except now he noticed a figure who until then had only lurked in his
peripheral vision. Darting out of view, as if frightened that he had been seen,
was a tall man, wearing jeans and a loose grey hooded sweatshirt. His age, his
colour, his expression were all impossible to discern: his face was entirely
obscured by the hood. Only one thing was clear: he was stalking Will.

W
ill headed straight for the
steps, taking care not to look over his shoulder. Once inside, he walked just
as briskly. But he felt them before he heard them: the click, click of
footsteps behind his, clacking along the cold stone floor. He headed for the
first staircase he could find, daring, as he moved up another flight, to take a
glance down. As he feared, the grey hood was right behind him.

Now he broke into a jog, taking two more flights up. Once he hit a landing,
he broke off, taking an instant decision to seek refuge in a room full of
card-index catalogues. He dashed in, slowing to an immediate walk: even then, and
silent, he felt too noisy, too sweaty for the hushed concentration of the room.
He turned around: the hood.

He walked faster, under a vast painting showing a
trompe l’oeil
sky. Dark clouds were gathering. Spotting an opening on the back wall, Will
went in, only to discover it was not an exit but a small photocopying room. He
darted back out, but now the hooded man was just a few yards away.

Will saw the double doors out and ran for them. Once through, he was in a
throng of people enjoying a mid-work break. He weaved through them to get to
the staircase on the other side and, clutching hold of the hand rail, galloped down,
two at a time. A woman carrying a computer monitor was in his way and he had to
dodge to get past her. He moved to the left and so did she; he moved to the
right and so did she. He leapt to her side to get past, but she let out an involuntary
yelp — followed by a thud and a cymbal-crash of broken glass. She had
dropped the machine.

Now Will was in the main foyer, facing a large cloakroom. This was where
regular readers began their day. There were lockers for bags and a long rail
for coats that snaked around the room, as if in a dry-cleaner’s shop. The
man in the hood was walking towards him. Calmly.

Will had to move fast. While the attendant was looking the other way, he
vaulted over the wooden counter and plunged into the thickness of the coats.
Squeezing between a heavy anorak and a shaggy, afghan jacket, he pressed
himself against the back wall. He could sense his stalker had stopped; Will
guessed he was by the cloakroom, peering over the counter, searching. He tried
to still his breathing.

Suddenly, he felt movement. The attendant was handling the coats, pushing
whole bunches of them aside, looking for a number. Will held in his cheeks to
make no sound. But the man was getting closer, closer, closer — until he
stopped, less than a foot away. Will felt him pull out a jacket and return to
the counter.

Then, a flash of grey. Will was sure the stalker had walked past. He allowed
himself an exhalation; perhaps he had not been seen. He would wait five more
minutes, then come out, find TC and get the hell out of here.

But the hand got him first — thrust in before he had seen a face, like
the robotic arm on a space probe. It grabbed his shirt by the collar, in an
attempt to drag him into the daylight. Even in the dark, he could see the grey
sweatshirt fabric that covered the arm. Twice Will locked onto it with both
hands, pulling it off himself. But each time the hand came back, eventually
smashing Will’s chin in the process. Crammed behind the coats, Will just
could not get the space he needed to reach beyond this single, flailing arm
— and hit the man behind it.

The struggle was soon over. Will was pulled out of his hiding place like the
meat from a sandwich. Now he came face to face with the man in the hood. To his
complete surprise, he recognized him immediately.

‘W
hy did you run away? I
just want to talk.’

Talk? You just want to talk? So why were you bloody stalking me? Christ!’
Will was bending over, one hand on his knee, the other tending to his chin.

‘I didn’t want to approach you while you were with, um, that
woman. Upstairs. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know if it was
safe.’

‘Well, it would have been safer for me, believe me. Jesus Christ’

Will found a chair and all but fell into it, trying to catch his breath. ‘So
what the hell’s this about, Sandy? Or is it Shimon?’

‘Shimon Shmuel. But call me Sandy, it’ll be easier.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you, I really did not.
But I couldn’t let you run away. I have to talk to you. Something very
bad has happened.’

‘You’re telling me. My wife has been kidnapped; I’ve
practically been tortured; your rabbi killed some guy in Bangkok; and now you’ve
spent a weekend stalking me, before the grand finale of a whack on the chin.’

‘I haven’t spent a weekend stalking you.’

‘Save it, Sandy, really. I saw you from the window last night: the
baseball cap nearly threw me, but I got it in the end.’

‘I promise you, I came to find you today. Not last night. I was in
Crown Heights last night.’

‘Well, someone was waiting for me outside the
Times
building
yesterday evening. They followed me to my friend’s house and waited there
too. And so far the only person I know who does that kind of thing is you.’

‘I swear that wasn’t me, Will. It wasn’t. I had no need to
come then.’

‘What do you mean, no need?’

‘It hadn’t happened last night. Or at least we didn’t know
about it till this morning.’

‘What hadn’t happened?’

It’s Yosef Yitzhok.’ The voice faltered enough to make Will look,
for the first time, at Sandy’s face. He still had not removed his hood
— a substitute skullcap, it was doing the religious duty of covering his
head — but even in the shadow it cast, Will could see. Sandy’s eyes
were red raw. He looked like he had been weeping for hours.

‘What’s happened to him?’

‘He’s dead, Will. He was murdered, brutally murdered.’

‘Oh my God. Where?’

‘No one knows. They found him dead in an alleyway near the
shul
.
It was early this morning, probably on his way to
shacharis
. Sorry,
morning prayers. His
tallis
, his prayer shawl, was red with blood.’

‘I don’t believe this. Who would do such a thing?’

‘I don’t know. None of us know. That’s why Sara Leah you met
her, my wife — said I should find you. She thought this was somehow
connected with you.’

‘With me? She blames me?’

‘No! Who said blame? She just thinks this might be connected to
whatever happened on Friday night.’

‘You told her about all that?’

‘Only what I knew. But Yosef Yitzhok’s wife is her sister.

We’re family, Will. He’s my brother-in-law.
Was
my
brother-in-law.’

The redness of his eyes was about to deepen again.

‘And Yosef Yitzhok said something to his wife?’

‘Not much, I don’t think. Just that he had spoken to you on
Friday night. He said you were caught up in something very important. No, that
wasn’t the word. He said you were caught up in something catastrophic.
That was the word he used,
catastrophic’

‘Did he say anything else to his wife?’

‘Just that he hoped and prayed that you understood what was happening.
And that you would know what to do.’

At that moment, Will could not have felt more helpless. The rabbi had said
it first and now Yosef Yitzhok was repeating it, from the grave.
An ancient
story is unfolding
, that’s what the rabbi had said.
Something
mankind has feared for millennia
. Now YY was telling him the stakes were so
high that he was praying that Will would know what to do. And yet, Will felt as
confused as ever. If anything, more confused — his head swirling with the
bizarre coincidence of Macrae, Baxter and Samak, three noble men all dying
horrible deaths; the blustering rhetoric of the Book of Proverbs and, most
recently, the impenetrable, mystical geometry of the diagram he and TC had found
in this very library.

‘Shit! TC She’s still upstairs. Come with me. Hurry!’

Will was scolding himself at every step, as he bounded up stairs and along
corridors, Sandy behind him, returning to the reading room. How could he have
left her alone?

Will marched towards the desk he and TC had shared nearly an hour earlier.
As he got nearer, his heart sank. A woman was sitting there — but it was
not TC. She had gone.

Will punched the desk with his fist, sending a bolt of pain through his arm
— and a look of terror across the woman’s face.
How can I have
been such a fool!
These kidnappers had now taken two women from under his
nose. He was meant to have protected them both and he had failed them. Both.

Sandy was standing by him, but Will could not see him or hear him. Only one
thing stirred him out of his torpor: the steady, persistent vibration he now
felt on his thigh. It was his phone.

2 New Messages

He pressed the first one.

Where are you? Had to leave. Call me. TC.

Will sighed out a chestful of air. Thank God up above for that. He opened
the next message, sure it would be TC, suggesting the place they should meet
up. What he saw made him take two steps back in amazement.

Fiftieth and Fifth.

Yosef Yitzhok might have been dead — but the riddles lived on.

‘A
nd when did it arrive?’

‘Just now. This second.’

‘Well, the first conclusion we can draw is that Yosef Yitzhok was not
our informant after all.’

‘We can’t be certain of that, TC. His killer may have grabbed his
phone and carried on sending messages.’ As he said it, Will saw the
absurdity of his suggestion. What were the chances that an assailant would
steal a phone, check the ‘sent’ file and carry on sending perfectly
coded messages in the same vein? Besides, there was an easy way to check.

‘Sandy, can you do me a favour? Call home and find out if anyone took
Yosef Yitzhok’s phone when he was killed.’ Now talking back into
the mouthpiece, to TC, he offered another theory. ‘What if someone stole
his phone in the first place?’

‘Well, then it wouldn’t have been YY sending the messages at
all, would it?’ TC was getting exasperated. Fearful of returning to her
own apartment, she had fled to Central Park. To her great relief, she had run
into some people she knew: married friends, with plenty of kids. As Will could
hear through the phone, she had stuck herself in the middle of the group. The
strollers, toddlers and picnic blankets would, she reckoned, serve as a
security cordon, keeping the stalkers and kidnappers at bay. Listening to the
sounds of childhood chatter, of softball games and a mother handing out cake, Will
felt a pang of envy or, rather, longing — longing for a Sunday afternoon
of relaxed, sun-kissed normality.

‘You mean, it was someone else all along.’

‘I think so, yes. YY is dead but the messages have not stopped. Ergo,
he wasn’t the one sending them.’

‘So why would they kill him?’

‘Who?’

‘The Hassidim.’

‘We don’t know it was the Hassidim who killed him. That’s just
another conclusion you’re jumping to. The truth is, Will, we know hardly
anything. We can guess and speculate and theorize, but we know very little.’

‘What about the drawing in the library. Did you see anything?’

‘I think it’s probably telling us something very simple. It’s
saying, “Think kabbalah”. The image is so complex, full of so many
component parts, it can’t be about any one bit. It’s just the
general idea. That diagram is the fundamental building block of all kabbalah.
It’s almost like a logo.’

‘Hang on. There’s another one coming now. I’ll call you
back.’

He walked as he pressed the buttons to reveal the latest message, one which
he willed to be clear. Now that he did not have TC at his side, he desperately
needed a little simplicity.

Behold the lord of the heavens but
not of Hell.

They only had to walk a few blocks north to find the junction which the
earlier message had directed them to: Fiftieth Street and Fifth Avenue. That
was where they stood now.

Looming over them was the gothic fortress of St Patrick’s Cathedral
where, little more than a week ago, he had sat rapt, listening to
The
Messiah
with his father. A week ago but a different lifetime.

His father
. A spasm of guilt passed through Will: he had barely
included him in this search. It was obvious he wanted to help; he had made that
clear last night and again this morning, even doing his bit to decipher the
text messages. Yet Will had been impatient, happy to use his father as a glorified
chauffeur and not much more. Perhaps for all the effort of the last few years,
the two of them were not as close as Will liked to believe. Most men would
probably have looked to their fathers to be their chief ally in a crisis like
this, but Will was not most men. He had lived the bulk of his childhood, his
formative years, a continent away.