The Righteous Men (2006) (21 page)

‘I guess not.’

‘Well, you guess wrong. The hardcore devotees started camping out at
the graveside. When people asked them what on earth they were doing, they said,
“Waiting”. They wanted to be ready to welcome the Rebbe when he
rose from the dead.’

‘Are you sure these guys aren’t Christians?’

‘I know; it’s weird isn’t it? There’s some serious
debate going on about that, in fact. There are plenty of Jews who say Crown
Heights is effectively taking itself outside Judaism, that it is becoming
another faith. The argument is that Christianity was once just a form of
Judaism which believed the Messiah had come; now Crown Heights is making the same
move.’

‘The difference is they’re still waiting. Mind you, Christians are
still waiting for the second coming. Everybody’s waiting.’

This lot certainly are. They’re waiting for their leader to reveal
himself, for him to rise from the dead and tell them it’s all going to be
OK.’

‘You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?’

‘Kind of. Look, theologically speaking, they might be right. It is
quite true that, in the Messianic age, Judaism says the dead will live again.
And there’s nothing written that says the Messiah can’t be one of
them; you know, one of the dead. So they might be right. It’s just, I don’t
know, it just seems kind of sad to me. Like this is a group of children who’ve
lost their daddy or something. As the therapists would say, “they’re
hurting”.’

Will tried to square TC’s account — a cult traumatized by the
loss of their leader, stirring themselves to a Friday night fury as if
desperately summoning him back from the dead with the gang who had nearly
killed him a few hours earlier. He found sympathy did not come easily. ‘How
come you know so much about them?’

‘I read the papers,’ she said quickly; an instant scold. ‘It’s
all been in the
Times
.’

Will kicked himself. His haste at Tom’s meant he never did the
thorough Google search that would have told him all this — or at least
that the Rebbe was dead. More galling was the certain knowledge that all this
had, just as TC said, been in the paper but that he had skimmed over it: weirdo
religious news, not relevant.

That was last night. This morning’s thunderbolt came once he finally
found the phone charger, near the coffee pot. He plugged it in and his mobile
came silently to life. (He always set his to ‘silent’: you never
knew when a loud, synthetic chime would embarrass you.) The voicemail messages
declared themselves first: four from his dad, three, increasingly sarcastic
ones from Harden, the last saying, ‘You better be on a story so good that
I win a Pulitzer for running it,’ before telling him he would be on ‘the
first boat back to Oxford’ if he did not report for duty soon. Two others
that Will skipped after a few words, deeming them non-urgent.

Next came the texts. One from Tom, wishing him luck.

And then:

Foot runs. B Gates.

He pressed the button marked ‘Details’ but the phone yielded
nothing. For number, it said ‘Withheld Private Caller’. For the
time, it uselessly gave the hour, minute and second Will had switched on the
phone. He had no idea who had sent it or when. Given that the meaning was
utterly opaque, that made the blank complete.

By now, TC was up, emerging from her mini-bedroom with a sleepy stretch.
Even in man’s-style boxer shorts and a thin strapped white vest, she
looked sumptuous. The navel ring was fully exposed now. Will felt a tremor of
movement in his groin, followed by a thump of guilt. To lust after your ex girlfriend
was appalling under any circumstances. To do so when your wife was a hostage in
fear of her life was contemptible. He gave TC only the merest acknowledgement, looked
back at his cell phone and reflexively tucked in his pelvis — as if to
staunch the flow of erection-threatening blood before it passed the point of no
return.

To his relief, TC kept some spare clothes behind the partition and she now
disappeared to put them on. When she emerged, Will handed her his phone. ‘Now
this,’ he said.

TC fumbled for her glasses; it was too early for lenses.

‘Hmm,’ she said, staring at the words.

Will briefed her on his early lines of inquiry. ‘I reckon this must be
from them, the Hassidim. They obviously got my number off the phone when they
had my bag.’

‘No, they wouldn’t have done that. It breaks Shabbat. And they
wouldn’t send a text message for the same reason. Both violate the
Sabbath.’

‘What, and dunking an innocent man into freezing water is OK?’

‘Technically, yes. They didn’t use any electricity, any fire. They
didn’t write anything down, didn’t use any machinery.’

‘So what they did to me was all perfectly kosher.’

‘Look, Will, don’t give me a hard time. I don’t make up these
rules. All I’m saying is, they would only break the Sabbath if there was
no alternative. So far they avoided that.’

‘But what about
pikuach nefesh
, you know the saving a soul thing?’

‘You’re right. If they felt it was justified, they would do it.

OK, so it could be them. What does it mean?’

‘Like I know. But I was wondering if perhaps foot means ending or
conclusion. You know how you told me Rosh Hashana means literally “head
of the year” so maybe foot is the end.’ Will smiled hopefully, like
a pupil expecting praise. TC did not smile.

‘And runs?’

‘You know, “it goes on”. It runs on. Or “the end approaches”.

Maybe Foot runs is a coded way of saying that the operation is nearing its
end. And the B Gates thing is just a sign off.

You know, Bill Gates. Mickey Mouse.’

TC did not react. She just took the phone over to the couch, sat down and
stared at it. ‘Can you pass me the pad? And a pen.’

Will sat next to her, so he could see what she was doing. He felt awkward as
soon as he had done it; his legs so near hers.

She was writing down a new message.

GPPU SVOT

‘OK, so that doesn’t work. Let’s try it the other way.’

ENNS QTMR

‘Nor does that,’ she said, not disappointed so much as
challenged.

‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s kiddie code-breaking stuff. Each letter stands for the one
after it — so that F is really G, O is really P — or,
alternatively, the one before it — so that F is really E and O is really N.
That way foot is either gppu or enns. Which means that neither of those is the
code. Let’s try another one.’

TC began to write, very fast, the alphabet across the page.

Then, underneath it, she did the same in reverse, so that Z, Y, X, appeared
directly under A, B, C.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A

‘Now we can read off and see what we get.’ Her finger scanned
along the line, then she started scribbling.

ULLG IFMH

‘Shit,’ Will hissed. ‘I am getting so tired of these
fucking games. What the hell does this mean?’

‘We’re not thinking logically. Not many people send text messages
by phone like this.’

‘Brits do.’

‘Yeah, but most Americans don’t. And it would have been just as
easy to communicate by email. But they didn’t do that. Why not?’

‘Because they know that we can trace their emails. They must know that
I worked out where their last one came from.’

‘Sure, but that might not be a bad thing from their point of view.
They might want you to know it was a message from them. No, I reckon they chose
a different method for a reason.

Can you pass me your phone?’

She grabbed it eagerly, instantly finding the messaging programme. She hit ‘Create
message’ and began typing with her thumbs. Will had to huddle even closer
to see what she was doing. He could smell her hair and had to fight the urge not
to breathe deeply: in an instant, her scent had carried him back to those long
hot afternoons together.

That in turn jogged another sense memory, the perfume of Beth. He liked it
best when it was strongest: when she dressed up to go out for the evening. She
might have got her outfit just right; he would want to rip it all off, to
ravish her there and then. Later, at the party, he would spot her across the room
and find himself looking at his watch: he wanted to get her back home. He was
suddenly flooded with memories, of TC and of Beth, and they were arousing him.
He felt confused.

TC was typing the word
FOOT
. Now her thumbs
searched for the * button; she pressed it twice, and a smile began to form
around her lips. The display changed, showing the word
FOOT
,
then font then don’t, then enou, then emot, then donu and finally ennu
before going back to foot. TC wrote down the word don’t.

Next she keyed in
RUNS
, which showed up on the
screen as
SUMS, SUNS, PUNS, STOP, RUMP, SUMP, PUMP
, as
well as
STOR, SUNR
and
QUOR
.
She wrote one of those down, too.

‘There,’ she said, with the satisfaction of a bookish schoolgirl
who had just completed her algebra homework in record time. The two-word
nonsense of
FOOT RUNS
now appeared as a clear message
of encouragement.

DON’T STOP
.

It was not really a code at all, thought Will. Just a neat use of the ‘predictive’
language function on most cell phones: every time you tried to punch in a word,
the phone offered possible alternatives using the same combination of buttons.
You pressed 3,6,6,8 to mean
FOOT
, but you might have
meant
DON’T
so the machine cleverly offered you
that option. Whoever sent this message had found a novel use for the function.

The satisfaction of TC’s handiwork was brief. True, they had decoded
the message, but they hardly knew what it meant and they still had no idea who
had sent it.

‘So who the hell is Bill Gates?’

‘Let’s have a look,’ said TC, picking up the phone again.

‘Well, B could be C or A.’ She keyed in the word
GATES
. ‘And that could be
HATES
or
HAVES
or
HAVER
or
HATER
.’

‘So what would that mean?’ said Will. ‘A hater? A hater of
what? Or is it B Haves as in “behaves”?’

‘Or maybe it’s the opposite of “a hater”,’
said TC, suddenly excited.

‘The opposite?’

‘The opposite of a hater. A friend.’

‘But it doesn’t say that. It’s just gates or hates or
haves or hates.’

‘Or
haver
.
Haver
is the word for friend in Hebrew. B
Gates is A
Haver
. This message says, “Don’t stop, a friend.”‘
She began circling, staring at the floor. ‘Who would want to stiffen your
resolve now? Who would think there was a chance you would give up?’

‘The only people who even know about this are you, my father, Tom and
the Hassidim themselves.’

‘You’re sure there’s no one else. No one who’s aware
this is happening?’

With a stab, Will thought of Harden and the office: he would have to do
something about that eventually.

‘No. No one knows. And since neither you, nor Tom, nor my Dad need to
contact me anonymously that leaves the Hassidim. I think we may have a bit of a
split on our hands.’

‘What do you mean?’

Will enjoyed the novelty of TC being a pace behind him for once. Politics
never was her strongest suit.

‘A split. A split in the ranks of the enemy. The only person who could
have sent this would be somebody who heard the Rebbe, I mean the rabbi I spoke
to yesterday, telling me to back off. They must want me to ignore that advice.
They must disagree with what the rabbi’s doing. This person doesn’t
want me to stop. And I think I can guess who it is.’

T
hese days he came down to
check only once a week. The Secret Chamber now seemed to run itself, needing
only the lightest supervision. These visits of his were less practical than sentimental:
it gave him pleasure to see his little invention working so well.

He had designed things before of course. Down at the docks, he had come up
with a new roll-on, roll-off method for unloading the boats that came in from
Latin America and went on to the US. He had not planned it this way, but his new
system was said to have revolutionized the country’s drugs trade. He had
only been trying to improve the efficiency of import-export. But thanks to him,
cocaine could come in from Colombia and be bound for Miami with the shortest
possible turnaround. From there, and in a matter of hours, the parcels of white
powder would spider out to America’s cities — Chicago, Detroit, New
York. Haiti’s drugs bosses boasted that if ten lines of coke were snorted
into the nostrils of a US citizen at any given moment, it was certain that at
least one had passed through Port-au-Prince.

In his social circle, that gave Jean-Claude Paul prestige.

Among the well-heeled dollar millionaires of Petionville, each in their
armour-fenced, high-walled villas, no one fussed too much as to the ethical
origins of one’s wealth. That you could drive a Mercedes and send your
wife to Paris to replenish her wardrobe and re-tint her highlights was enough.
When the Americans invaded in 1994 they called the mansion dwellers of
Petionville MREs — morally repugnant elites — and Jean-Claude was
classed among them.

Maybe that was why his brain had come up with the Secret Chamber, as a way
to make amends. He could not imagine where else the idea could have come from:
it seemed to arrive in his head fully formed, nothing to do with him.

The chamber was, in fact, a single-storey building, painted white. It looked
like a glorified hut, no more noticeable than a bus shelter. Crucially, there
were entrances on all four sides which were open at all times.