The Righteous Men (2006) (41 page)

‘You mean the Rebbe had already told him?’

‘Not directly, of course. But the Rebbe had given him the answer.
Yosef Yitzhok had heard it. All he needed to do was to remember it. And do you
know what it was? It was the last line of the last talk at the last
farbrengen
the Rebbe ever addressed. “Space depends on time. Time reveals space”.
Those were his last words in public’

There was a pause.

‘Incredible,’ said TC.

‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ said Will, suddenly
the dunce of the class.

‘Don’t worry. Yosef Yitzhok was baffled too. These were beautiful
sentences. But they were an enigma.
Space depends on time. Time reveals
space
. What does that mean? That’s when Yosef Yitzhok came to me,
letting me in on his theory. The Rebbe often spoke in riddles, in elliptical
sentences that might take many hours — many years even — to study
and interpret. Yosef Yitzhok spent a long night working away at these sentences.
And then he had what you would call a brainwave and what I would call a helping
hand from HaShem.’

‘You may know that the Rebbe was a very close follower of science and
technology. He read
Scientific American
and
Nature
and a whole
variety of journals. He was always up to date on the latest developments, in
neuroscience, in biochemistry. But he had a special interest in technology. He
loved gadgets! He never owned them: he was the least materialistic man you could
ever know. But he liked to know about them.

‘Yosef Yitzhok knew that about the Rebbe. And that’s what gave
him his idea. Here, I’ll show you.’

Rabbi Freilich reached for a worn, leather-bound book and thumbed rapidly
through the pages. He found the page and then the verse he was looking for.

‘Now what is the year?’

Will was about to answer when TC got there first. ‘Five thousand seven
hundred and sixty-eight.’

Will frowned. ‘What?’

‘It’s the Hebrew calendar,’ TC explained. ‘It dates
back to creation. Jews believe the world has been in existence for less than
six thousand years.’

‘OK,’ said the rabbi. ‘The year is 5768. And here is a
verse from Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs. In fact this is a crucial verse.
Verse 18. This is what Yosef Yitzhok tried out.

We count along the line and mark the fifth letter.’ The rabbi’s finger
stopped at the selected character. ‘Then the seventh from there.’
It stopped again. ‘Then the sixth from there. And then the eighth. You
see: 5-7-6-8. And we keep doing that till we get to the end of the line. So in
this case, the fifth letter is a
yud
. The seventh letter after that is a
hay. The sixth is a
mem
. And the eighth is also a
mem
. You keep
on like that until you have a string of letters.’

‘Which then convert into numbers.’ Will was guessing.

‘Precisely so. A string of numbers. Here, I’ll show you one of
the very earliest ones Yosef Yitzhok worked out.’

The rabbi stood up, leading Will and TC over to a second wipe-board. There,
neatly written in a black marker pen, was a long series of digits: 699331,
5709718, 30.

‘Don’t tell me that’s a phone number.’

‘No, it is not. We wondered about that, too. We even tried a few. No,
this is where the Rebbe’s eye for the latest advances in technology was
so important.’

TC was staring at the figure, as if the sheer penetration of her gaze would
crack it open.

‘It is—’ and at this the rabbi could not deny himself a
little smile of amused pride, as if he had still not got over the brilliance of
it all ‘—a GPS number. Or rather, contained in this number are the
co-ordinates of longitude and latitude that give you a GPS number, co-ordinates
for the Global Positioning System.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Will. ‘You mean that
whole satellite navigation thing?’ It sounded preposterous.

‘That’s it. A system that maps the entire globe, watched from
space, and which gives precise co-ordinates for any spot on earth. The Rebbe
must have read about it. Or maybe he just knew.’

‘You’re telling me that contained in those thirty-five biblical verses
are the co-ordinates for thirty-five righteous men?’

‘We did not believe it either, Mr Monroe. One verse gave us a number
for a remote hillside in Montana: according to the map, nobody lived there. But
we sent the man who runs our centre in Seattle to take a closer look and he saw
a log cabin. With a man inside, living alone. Like something from our folk
tales, Tova Chaya: a simple man in the forest.’

Pat Baxter
, thought Will. The very cabin he had gazed at just a few
days ago.

‘Another number was an empty space in the middle of the Sudan. Again,
no one was meant to live there. But then we saw from satellite pictures that a
refugee camp had sprung up on that spot during the last few months, saving
people who were fleeing for their lives. It was maintained by one man: the
international agencies were not even sure who he was. So we began to realize
that we were right. That the Rebbe was right.’

‘What about this number?’ asked Will, pointing at the wipe-board.
‘What did this come out as?’

‘I’ll show you.’ The rabbi walked the few paces to where one
of the young men was working away at a computer. TC and Will caught up,
watching the technician over his shoulder.

The rabbi pointed at the number on the wipe-board and murmured an
instruction.

The young man punched in the digits, waited a few seconds and then watched
as the computer came back with an answer.

11 Downing Street, London, SW1 2AB, UK.

‘So this was the verse for Gavin Curtis?’

The rabbi nodded.

Will needed to sit down and, ideally, drink something.

Though nothing was around. These men would use computers and work hard, even
though it was Yom Kippur, because lives were at stake.
Pikuach nefesh
.
But they would break no rules they did not have to.

Now TC was speaking. ‘So that was what the Rebbe was trying to say.
Space
depends on time. Time reveals space
. The location depends on time. If you
know the time, the year — if you use the number 5678 — then you
will know the space. You’ll work out the location.’ She was shaking
her head in wonder at the ingenuity of it. ‘And I suppose if you try the same
verses with different years, you get different places. Different people.’

‘Well, our texts are good at guarding their secrets, Tova Chaya. Yosef
Yitzhok wanted to do as you say. He worked with people here to devise a
computer programme, to do what we just did with that one verse: stopping at
every fifth or seventh character. He did it for different years. And then he
ran it through the GPS system and, sure enough, he started getting place names.
But what use is a place name, Kabul or Mainz, for 1735? How are we to know who
lived there then? Besides, Yosef Yitzhok always wondered if that was too easy.’

‘If what was too easy?’

‘He wasn’t sure it would necessarily be the same verses for all
time. Those were the verses the Rebbe had mentioned for his generation. But
maybe the other great sages who had somehow been let in on this secret in the
past — the Baal Shem Tov or Rabbi Leib Sorres — maybe they knew of
the righteous men of their time in a different way. They didn’t have this
GPS, did they? This method wouldn’t have made much sense to them, would
it? They would have had their own ways — different verses, or maybe a
different method entirely.

This, I now realize, is what lay behind the Rebbe’s interest in
technology. I think he understood that even the most enduring, ancient truths
could outwardly change very fast, that they would find new forms. Hassidim had
to know about the modern world, because this too is HaShem’s creation. He
is found here, too.’

Will and TC were silent. Awestruck, even: it was not just the lives of the
thirty-six that were keeping Rabbi Freilich working around the clock, even now
on the solemnest night of the Jewish year, when all work was prohibited. This
man, who spoke with erudition and in calm, rational paragraphs, clearly
believed he had less than twenty-four hours to save the world. Will tried to
blot that out, to focus on his own, immediate need: Beth.

‘OK,’ he said, like a police captain calling his squad to order.
‘So that’s how the system works. The crucial question is, who else
knows about this? Who else might know the identity of the righteous men?’

By now they were back at the table, where the rabbi had all but fallen into
his chair. Will could see the exhaustion in his face.

‘You were our best hope.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘When you came here on
shabbos
. On Friday night. We thought you
were some kind of spy. From the people who are doing this, I mean. You were
asking questions, you were an outsider. Maybe you were trying to find out about
the
lamad vav
. That’s why we, why I, treated you so harshly. Then we
discovered you were—’ Will could see the rabbi did not want to name
him as the husband of their hostage ‘—you were something else.’

Will could feel the anger rising within him again. Why did he not just shake
this man and force him to reveal where Beth was? Why was he putting up with
this? Because, a voice inside him began, if these people were fanatical enough
to kidnap Beth for no apparent reason, they were fanatical enough to hold on to
her. Rabbi Freilich might have looked weak and exhausted, but there were a
dozen men in here who were stronger. If Will lunged, they would soon have him pinned
down.

‘All right, so it’s not me. Who else knows?’

The rabbi sunk lower. ‘That’s just it. No one knows. No one
outside this community. And not even this community has any idea what’s
going on: there would be mass panic if they did. If they knew that the
lamadvavniks
are being murdered, every day more of them killed, there would be chaos here.
They would believe the end of the world was coming.’

‘You believe that, don’t you?’ It was said in Tova Chaya’s
gentlest voice.

The rabbi looked up at her, his eyes wet. ‘I fear that what the Rebbe
spoke of is coming to pass.
Di velt shokelt zich und treiselt zich
. That’s
what he used to say, Tova Chaya.
The world is trembling and shaking
. I
fear for what judgement this day is about to bring upon us.’

Will was pacing. ‘So no one outside this small group has any idea of
this. Just you, Yosef Yitzhok and a few of your best students.’

‘And now you.’

‘And you’re sure no one breathed a word?’

‘To whom? Who even knew about this whole subject? Why would anyone
ask? But when Yosef Yitzhok was found dead. Well, then…’

‘Then, what?’

‘It confirmed that somebody knows what we know and wanted to know
more. until then, I thought maybe it was a strange coincidence that the
tzaddikim
were dying. Maybe this was the work of HaShem, for a purpose beyond our
understanding. But Yosef Yitzhok being murdered, that’s not a plan of
HaShem’s.’

‘You think someone was pressing him for information?’

‘Just before you came tonight, I had a visit. The police.

They think Yosef Yitzhok was tortured before he was killed.’

Will and TC both recoiled.

‘What did they want from him that they didn’t know already?’

‘Ah, this you tried to ask me about before. Remember, I told you about
the verses the Rebbe quoted in his talks? The ones Yosef Yitzhok had memorized?
Well, there was something missing.’

‘There were only thirty-five.’

‘That’s right. Only thirty-five. You can use the method I just
showed you, converting letters into numbers and turning those numbers into
co-ordinates, but you would still have only thirty-five righteous men. Isn’t
it obvious what the men who killed Yosef Yitzhok wanted to know? They wanted
the identity of number thirty-six.’

W
ill’s first impulse was
to ask Rabbi Freilich the name of this thirty-sixth man. It was crucial. If he
and TC knew that, they could work out where the killers were heading next:
whoever he was, they were bound to be on his trail.

But the rabbi would not budge. For one thing, he said, the death of Yosef
Yitzhok suggested the murderers were still not in possession of this vital
fact. Had YY cracked under torture?

The rabbi was convinced he had not. ‘I know this man. His intellect,
his soul. He would not betray the word of the Rebbe.’

He was sure the secret was safe. If he shared it with TC and Will, it could
only bring harm to them. Better that they did not know. (Will was sceptical: if
the torturers came after him, they were hardly likely to inquire politely
whether he had any useful information and then, once assured he did not, beat a
polite retreat.) Will tried’ another approach. ‘This thirty-sixth
righteous man? Is he still alive?’

‘We think so. But I really will not say any more, Mr Monroe. I cannot
say any more.’

‘Is he the only one alive?’

‘We’re not certain. Our sources of information are very patchy.
We have had to scramble people to the furthest corners of the world to find
these
tzaddikim
. Each time we have been getting there too late.’

‘You mean, you didn’t work out these names until this week?’

‘No, Yosef Yitzhok made this breakthrough a few months ago. And, as I
told you, we sent people to take a look, just to see who these
tzaddikim
were. We planned to keep an eye on them, no more. Maybe give them food or money
if they were in trouble. But, to answer your question, we did not know they
were dying until this week. We’re not sure, but it only seems to have
started a few days ago.’

‘On Rosh Hashana,’ said TC, her mind turning over visibly. ‘That’s
when Howard Macrae was murdered.’