Sam Bourne - The righteous men

'Here it is,' said the woman eventually, standing over the table where Will and TO had pitched camp. She did not hand them the book, nor did she lay it on the table. Instead she propped it up on a pair of wedge-shaped black Styrofoam blocks, so that the spine did not fully open. TO pulled out her notepad and reached for a pen.

'Pencils only, I'm afraid. No pens near a book of this quality.'

'I'm sorry. Pencils it is. Thanks very much. I'm sure we won't be too long.'

'Oh, I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right next to this book until it's back in its cabinet. Those are the rules.'

TO began turning the pages with slow deliberation. The manuscript was a relic from a vanished era; hand-crafted in Cracow, its pages were thick with four centuries of history. TO was wary even of touching it.

Will sat at her side, staring at the latest text message.

Mindful of the woman watching over them, he whispered, 'Is that some religious thing, to kiss the page?'

'Jews do kiss their prayer books when they're closed, or if they drop them on the floor. But not three times. And not specific pages.' TO was speaking without looking away from the book. She seemed to be in awe of it.

Will took out his notepad. Maybe this was an exercise in mathematics; perhaps if it was expressed as arithmetic. Will wrote '3 times' as '3 x'. Perhaps I was the figure 1. What would that give him? 3 x I = 3. No good.

Then he took a second look at what he had written. Hold on. Will's mind suddenly went back to the Wednesday afternoons he had spent as a nine-year-old boy, in Mr McGregor's Latin class. McGregor was an old-school schoolmaster, all black gown and hurling the blackboard eraser, but every word he taught had stuck. Including the games he used to play with the Lower Remove to teach Roman numerals.

Hurriedly now Will wrote out '3 times' as three x's in succession: xxx. Now for 'I kiss'. Of course. The I was an i. And how did you denote a kiss, except with the letter x? (For only a flash, Will remembered the first time Beth signed off a text message with an x. Just one x, after her name, but it thrilled Will. They were in that brief, delicious overture of a relationship, falling in love, but not yet having said the L-word out loud. That x of Beth's was a taster.) Now he wrote it out: xxx for '3 times', ix for 'I kiss': xxxix.

"Turn to page thirty-nine.'

TO was slow, handling the text before her with solemn care. Will wanted to tear at the pages so that he could just see whatever they were meant to see right now.

'OK,' said TO finally. 'This is it.'

Before them was a page dominated by a graphic: ten circles arranged in geometric fashion and linked by a complex series of lines. Will had a faint memory of such drawings and it took him a while to place it. This reminded him of the chemistry textbooks of his youth, depicting molecular structures in two dimensions.

Except each circle had a word written inside it. Will had to squint to see that the script was Hebrew. It was jarring, geometry and scientific neatness in a drawing that was medieval.

'What are we looking at?'

He could see TO did not want to answer. She was hunched over the image, her shoulder all but blocking Will's view. 'I'm not sure yet. I need to look.'

'Come on, TO. I know you know what this is.' Will was shouting in a whisper. 'Tell me.'

Self-consciously, and aware of the hovering librarian, TO started to point and talk. 'This is the key image of kabbalah.'

'Kabbalah? As in Madonna? Red string and all that?'

TO rolled her eyes, then moulded her face into an expression that said, where do I start? 'No. That's just some bullshit celeb cult. It's about as close to real kabbalah as, I don't know, the Easter Bunny is to Christianity. Just listen.'

'Sorry.'

'Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. It's a very arcane form of Jewish study, closed off to most people. You're not meant to look at it until you've reached the age of forty. And it's for men only.'

'What about this picture?'

'It's like the starting point of kabbalah. It contains everything.

They call it the Tree of Life.'

'My God.'

'That's sort of what they think this is. It's a diagrammatic representation of the key qualities of God. Each of these circles is a Sefirah, a divine attribute.' She pointed at the lowest circle.

'See, it starts at the bottom with Malchut, that means Kingdom. That refers to the physical realm. Then it branches off into Yesod, Foundation, Hod, Glory and Nezah, Eternity.

Then it progresses, into Tiferet, Beauty, Gevurah, Judgment and Hesed, Mercy. And finally, at the top of the tree, there is Binah, which is kind of like intellectual understanding. And on the right, Hochmah, which is Wisdom. And at the summit, Keter, the Crown. Something like the divine essence.'

'So we're looking at the image of God.'

'Or the closest we're ever going to get to it.'

Will could not say anything. A shiver had run down his spine as TO had spoken. Maybe it was all just crankish hokum, but this series of lines and circles, drawn so many hundreds of years ago and taught down the generations only to those deemed able to cope with its secrets, seemed to radiate a kind of power.

TO spoke again. 'It's funny talking about the "image of God". The mystics believe that the whole reason for existence is that tiod wanted to behold God.'

Will looked bemused.

'until then, there was just God. Nothing else. Just a limitless, infinite God. The trouble was, there was no room for anything else: there was no room for God's creation, for the physical world that would mirror him. So he had to shrink a little. He had to contract, leaving a space so that a kind of mirror could exist — to reflect God back to himself. See, it says it here.' She picked up another book, one she had ordered while waiting for the manuscript, rapidly flicking through the pages until she found what she was looking for.

'until the moment of Zimzutn, contraction, "Face did not gaze upon Face". God could not see himself.'

Will was fascinated by this image and even more so by the explanation TO was supplying, but he was dispirited by it, too. This was deep theological water: how deep would he and TO have to dive before they found the connection to the here and now, to the Hassidim, to their victims and to Beth?

Once again, he felt a rising indignation with Yosef Yitzhok.

Why could he not just give it to them straight?

It had failed once before, but he decided to try a direct appeal again. While TO pored over the drawing, sometimes cocking her head to one side to read the text on the opposite page, he rummaged in his bag and, away from the prying eyes of the librarian, he texted YY.

We're in the library. We see the drawing.

We need more.

He noticed the time on the phone display: 3.30pm. Which meant it was the dead of night in Bangkok. Will looked at the BlackBerry; nothing from the foreign desk.

'Listen,' he whispered to TO. 'I'm going outside to call the paper. I'll be back in a few minutes.'

'Bring me a soda.'

As soon as he was out of the main reading room, he started dialling the foreign desk number. Andy picked up before Will got out of the building.

'Yo, Will. How you doing? Shit, I was meant to send you that stuff, wasn't I? Sorry, been crazy here all afternoon.'

'Andy! I told you I needed it right away!'

'I know, I know. Sorry. I fucked up. Anyway, here it comes.'

'Just read it out to me now, will you? I can't wait for the BlackBerry.'

By now Will was outside the main entrance, pacing up and down at the top of that vast staircase.

'Will, we are slightly on deadline here.' The word was delivered in a mock-English accent; Andy was sending him up, which was a good sign. 'OK. Here goes. I'll have to be quick and I'll skip over the funny names, OK? From John Bishop, Bangkok. Samak Sangsuk was mourned yesterday by those who knew him best — and by a few who hardly knew him at all.