The Righteous Men (2006) (35 page)

‘So when the day came, I gave the kids breakfast, as always, called
out goodbye to my mother, as always, and I walked to the subway station.’

‘And you never went back.’

‘Never.’

Will’s mind was speeding, spilling with questions. But he was also
overrun with answers. Suddenly, he saw so much that had been hidden. TC was no
toddler nickname, its origins forgotten. It was a vestige of Tova Chaya’s
former life. And no wonder TC’s parents were such a mystery: they were
from a past she had abandoned. Of course there were no pictures: that would
have betrayed her secret.

‘Do they even know you’re alive?’

‘I speak to them by phone, before the major festivals. But I haven’t
seen them since I was seventeen.’

In an instant, TC made sense. Of course she was brilliant but knew nothing
of pop music and junk TV: she had grown up without them. Of course she spoke no
French or Spanish: she had devoted her time to Yiddish and Hebrew instead.

Will suddenly thought of TC’s eating habits — the fondness for
Chinese food, studded with jumbo prawns, the fry-up breakfasts, with generous
rations of bacon. She loved all that stuff. How come? ‘The zeal of a
convert,’ she said wryly.

Now that he had been to Crown Heights himself, Will realized the scale of TC’s
rupture from her upbringing. He looked at her now: the tight top revealing the
shape of her breasts; the exposed midriff; the navel stud. He thought back to
the notice he had seen in Crown Heights.

Girls and women who wear immodest garments, and thereby call attention to
their physical appearance, disgrace themselves …

Her break from Hassidism could not have been more complete. And he was
forgetting the biggest rebellion of all: him.

People from her world did not have sex outside marriage.

They rarely married people from outside their own sect of Hassidism, let
alone non-Jews. Yet she had had a long, physical relationship with him — not
her husband and not a Jew.

For him it had been a wonderful romance. He now understood that for her it
had been a revolution.

He suddenly saw TC differently. He imagined her as she would have been: a
bright, studious girl of Crown Heights groomed for a life of modesty,
child-rearing and dutiful observance.

What a journey she had made, crossing this city and centuries of tradition
and taboo. He stood up, walked over to her and gave her a long, warm hug.

‘It’s a privilege to meet you, Tova Chaya.’

H
e wanted to interrogate TC
for hours, about her life, about the secret she had kept for so long. Lots of
Jewish people became orthodox; they were known as
chozer b’tshuva
,
literally ‘one who returns to repentance’. She had gone the other way:
chozer b’she’ela
. She had returned to question.

But they had no time for that conversation, no matter how much they wanted it.
They had to get to Crown Heights. Yosef Yitzhok had been murdered, though
neither of them had any idea why. The last messages Will had received directing
him to Atlas at the Rockefeller Center — had been sent after YY’s
death, proof that he had not been the informer after all. So why would anyone
want him dead? Will was baffled. All he knew was that things were turning
steadily more vicious. The rabbi had not been exaggerating: time was running
out.

Just as pressing was TC’s promise. All would become clear, she had
said, once they were in Crown Heights. She could not tell Will herself what was
going on. But the explanation lay there. They just had to find it.

‘I’m going to need to use your bathroom. And I’m going to
need to borrow some of Beth’s clothes.’

‘Sure,’ Will said, trying hard to shrug off the potential symbolism
of that request. He led TC to Beth’s closet and, steeling himself, pulled
back the sliding door. Instantly his nostrils filled with the scent of her. He
was sure he could smell her hair; he could think himself into the aroma of that
patch of skin below her ear. He breathed in deeply, through his nose.

TC pulled out a plain white blouse, one Beth wore for formal work meetings,
usually under a dark trouser-suit. It was cut high, Will noticed.
We request
that all women and girls, whether living here or visiting, adhere at all times
to the laws of modesty
…

She turned to Will. ‘Does Beth have any really long skirts?’

Will thought hard. There were a couple of long dresses, including a
particularly beautiful one he had bought for his wife on their first
anniversary. But they were evening wear.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Let me look at the back here.’
He wondered if Beth had gotten around to throwing it out; he knew she planned
to. It was a long, drab dark velvet skirt that Will had mocked mercilessly. He
called it Beth’s ‘spinster cellist number’. She put up a
mock-defence, but she could see his point: it did make her look like one of
those silver-haired lady players spotted in every orchestra. But she felt
attached to it. To Will’s great relief at this moment, she had never got
rid of it.

‘OK,’ said TC, moving towards the bathroom. ‘These will have
to go.’ She cocked her head to one side to take off her earrings. Then
she pressed her face closer to the mirror and began the complex manoeuvre of
removing her nose-stud.

Finally she gazed down at her middle and unscrewed the ring that pierced her
belly button. She now had a small pile of metal in her hand, which she placed
by the basin.

‘Now for the toughest job of all.’ She reached into her bag to
produce a newly purchased bottle of shampoo, one specially designed for the
task at hand. She started running the tap, grabbed a towel and slung it around
her shoulders. As if bracing herself for a nasty ordeal, she bent down and
lowered her head towards the water.

As Will watched she began to lather up and rinse. She had to scrub hard, but
soon her effort was paying off. The water in the sink began to turn a blueish
purple. The dye was coming out, a stream of it swirling around the white
porcelain and away. Will was fascinated by the coloured water. It was not only
removing a chemical from TC’s hair; it seemed to be washing away the last
decade of her life.

He left to collect a few things of his own. What had the rabbi said? ‘All
will become clear in a few days’ time.’ That was two days ago.
Perhaps he was about to close in on the truth, at long last. What would it be?
What was this ‘ancient story’ into which he and his wife had
somehow fallen? Once he knew, would he be back with her? Would he hold her again?
Would that be tonight?

‘So, what do you think?’

Will wheeled around to see a different woman. Her hair was now dark brown,
brushed straight and long into a 1990s style bob. She wore sensible black
shoes, a long black skirt and a white blouse. She had borrowed a thick, quilted
jacket of Beth’s that, in other circumstances, might have been
fashionable but which now looked only practical. Standing there in his
apartment was a woman who could have passed for any of the young wives and
mothers he had seen in Crown Heights two days earlier. She looked like Tova
Chaya Lieberman.

‘I’m so glad for the shoes. Thank God, they fit me and that’s
all that counts It took Will a moment to realize what TC was doing. She was
trying out the sing-song, Yiddish-inflected accent of a New York Hassidic
woman. It came to her so easily, it persuaded Will immediately.

‘Wow. You sound … different.’

This was the music of my youth, Will,’ she said, sounding like TC once
more. Except there was a wistfulness in her voice he had never heard before.
Then, snapping out of it: ‘Now, what about you?’

Me?’

‘Yes, you. We’re going there together. Tova Chaya wouldn’t
be seen with some shaygets. You need to look the part, too.

Now, come on: black suit, white shirt. You know the drill.’

Will did as he was told, finding the plainest outfit he could.

He had to reject a suit with a pin-stripe and a white shirt with a Ralph
Lauren polo player on the chest. Plain, plain, plain.

He looked in the mirror, hoping his transformation would be as convincing as
TC’s. But his face gave him away. He might have passed for American, but
Jewish? No. He had the colouring and bone structure of an Anglo-Saxon whose
roots lay in the villages of England rather than the steppes of Russia. Still,
that need not be a problem. Had he not seen the faces of Hanoi and Helsinki
among the faithful on Friday night? He would say he was a convert.

He only needed one last thing. ‘TC, where am I going to get a skullcap
from at this time of night?’

‘I already thought of that.’ With a flourish, TC held up a large
black disc of material. ‘I borrowed it from your friend Sandy when we
were in the park.’

‘Borrowed?’

‘Well, I knew they always carry spares. And I just happened to be
glancing into one of his jacket pockets. Here, put it on.’

As if in a ceremony, TC stretched onto tiptoes and placed the yarmulke onto
Will’s head. She dashed into the bathroom and came back with a hairclip. ‘There,’
she said, attaching it just so. ‘Reb William Monroe, it’s a pleasure
to meet you.’

Once in the cab, Will felt himself begin to twitch with excitement — and
nerves. He had never so much as attempted an undercover assignment and that’s
what this had become.

He was in costume, trying to pass himself off as somebody else. His
protective armour — chinos, blue shirt, notebook was gone. He felt
exposed.

In a bid for reassurance, he reached for his cell phone — a memento of
his regular life. A new message, apparently from the same unknown sender he had
once thought was Yosef Yitzhok.

Just men we are, our number few
Describable in digits two
We’re halved if these do multiply
If we few perish then all must die.

He had no idea what it meant but it hardly mattered now.

According to TC, everything was about to be explained. Habit made him check
his BlackBerry next. The red light was blinking: a
Guardian
News Alert.
Nostalgia had made him an electronic subscriber to the paper he used to read
back home.

Ordinarily, he rapidly deleted these email updates: he had enough to do
keeping up with the news in New York and America. But that ‘alert’
did the trick: what breaking news might justify its own bulletin? He clicked it
open.

The Robin Hood of Downing Street

Britain’s hottest political scandal in decades
took its most bizarre turn yet today.

The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gavin Curtis,
who police believe took his own life last week, seems set to be transformed overnight
from a disgraced hate figure into a posthumous folk hero. Treasury officials,
who earlier revealed that Mr Curtis had diverted large chunks of the UK’s
budget into a private Swiss bank account, have this morning disclosed where that
money ended up — in the hands of the world’s poorest people.

Instantly hailed by the tabloids as a ‘real-life
Robin Hood’, it seems Mr Curtis spent much of his seven years at Britain’s
exchequer robbing from the rich to give to the poor.

‘Our government grant doubled, then tripled under
Mr Curtis,’ said Rebecca Morris, a spokeswoman for Action on Hunger, a
leading relief agency. ‘We thought it was just government policy.’

It was nothing of the kind. Instead such generosity to
those fighting the wars on poverty, HIV/Aids and famine was the personal
decision of Mr Curtis himself— made possible by taking money out of
dormant bank accounts that had laid unnoticed and unclaimed for years and then
burying the details in a bafflingly complex labyrinth of Treasury data.

Some observers speculate that the Chancellor went
further in recent months, finding extra funds by raiding subsidies earmarked
for Britain’s arms exporters. ‘They got less so that the starving
of Africa and the sick of the Indian Ocean could get more,’ explained a
ministerial ally last night. One report suggested it was this move which led to
his eventual exposure.

‘He must have known the risks he was taking,’
Ms Morris told the
Guardian
. ‘And yet he was prepared to do all
that, just so the hungriest and weakest would have a better chance. I can’t
tell you how many lives Gavin Curtis must have saved. Some will call this a
scandal, but I think this was the action of a truly righteous man.’

T
C did not want to take the
risk of a phone call. She feared that Rabbi Mandelbaum would be too shaken by
the sound of a voice from his past. She feared, too, that he would instantly
call her parents. It was likely he had been plagued by guilt during these long
years: he had colluded in a secret with young Tova Chaya and look what had
happened. He was bound to blame himself, for encouraging her rebelliousness when
he should have curbed it. All this she imagined.

So she would turn up. at his front door instead, leaving him no option. She
looked at her watch: with any luck he would be back from synagogue by now. She
remembered the address and, once she saw that the lights were on inside, she told
the cab to wait. ‘Sorry, Will. I just need a second.’ She was
staring out of the window, as if unable to move. It’s been nearly ten
years. I was a different person.’

‘You take your time.’

Will stared out of the window, at streets that were preternaturally quiet.
Theirs was the only car; no one was out walking. The only sound came from the
radio, playing a song.

Will did not notice it at first, but one line of the lyric caught him. It
was John Lennon, declaring that ‘God is a concept, by which we measure
our pain.’ Will listened harder; the song was moving towards its climax. ‘I
don’t believe in magic … I don’t believe in bible … I
don’t believe in Jesus …