Sam Bourne - The righteous men

Will was getting in the way. What better way to take him out of circulation than to have him picked up not by them, but by the police! Will had to hand it to them: it was masterful.

How funny to think that a matter of days ago the central force in his life had been his career. His career! It was now in shreds: he had been caught engaged in gross misconduct by the editor himself. And now he had lost all standing in the eyes of the only man whose opinion really mattered: his father. He saw that now with great clarity. Of course it was bound to have affected him, growing up all those years without a dad. He felt it every day. Cricket games, when other boys were getting cheered from the boundary. Sports days, when he had no one to cheer in the fathers' race. People used to ask if his dad was dead.

He had gone through all the phases. He had been angry with his father; he had resented him; he had, on occasion, joined forces with his mother in hating him. But mainly he had missed him. He had missed the thing he had seen other boys get every day from their fathers: a hand on the shoulder, a tousle of the hair, a gesture that constituted male approval.

Now, in this prison cell, unfogged by ambiguity and nuance, he saw more starkly than ever before why he had crossed the Atlantic and changed his life. He had come to seek his father's approval. It was not going to find him sitting in London; he would have to come to America to get it for himself.

He had had a plan too. He would be the bright young man in a hurry, Will Monroe, Oxford star, come to make a splash in New York City. He had imagined the day, perhaps ten years from now, when he would wear black tie, lean into a microphone positioned a few inches too low for a man of his height, and thank the Pulitzer judges for their belief in him.

This very week — on the front page, twice — it had even seemed within reach. Yet now he was an exhausted wreck.

The woman he loved, and the future he dreamed of, had vanished.

Even as he engaged in this mental audit, he could feel a nagging intrusion — one more thought demanding to break the surface. Will had been pushing it below the waves more vigorously than the rest; he was hoping it would sink.

It forced itself up. What if the Hassidim are right? What if the moment the thirty-six men are killed, the world is no longer upheld? Everything about this wild theory had stacked up so far. The Chancellor really had performed an act of stunning goodness. So had Baxter. And they were disguised just as Mandelbaum said they would be. Could all the detail be right, but the idea itself be wrong?

Tonight he had witnessed, or just missed, the murder of a man who may well have been a tzaddik, one of thirty-six righteous ones. If that's who this man was, then it would be one more confirmation that the Hassidim were telling the truth — or at least part of it. It would also mean the killers of the lamad vav were getting very close to their goal. He looked at his watch: from what TO had told him, Yom Kippur would be over in about sixteen hours. They had so little time.

He had to know: was the man in that building a tzaddik, as the Hassidim had predicted? For the first time in hours, Will had an idea.

Some time later, the cell door opened again. Will braced himself to see his father. But it was Fitzwalter.

'Come with me.'

'Where am I going?'

'You'll see.'

Will was led downstairs, into a room with bright fluorescent lights. There were seven or eight other men there. At least three of them looked to be stoned; he guessed several were homeless. The door was slammed shut.

'OK, gentlemen,' said a voice over a loud-speaker. 'If you can all take your places against the back wall.' Two of the men in the group seemed to know exactly what to do, casually walking to the back, then standing and staring straight ahead. It was then Will saw the markings on the wall, indicating height. This was a line-up, an identity parade.

On the other side of the one-way mirror Mrs Tina Perez of the Greenstreet Mansions apartment building stared at the men arrayed before her.

'I know it's been a long night, Mrs Perez,' Fitzwalter was saying. 'So you just take your time. When you're ready, I have two questions to ask.'

'I'm ready.'

'I want you to look really hard and tell me whether you've seen any of these men before and, if you have, where you've seen them. OK? Is that clear?'

'The answer's no. I haven't seen any of these men before.

The man I saw had eyes you couldn't forget.'

'You're absolutely certain, Mrs Perez?'

I'm certain. He had his hands around poor Mr Bitensky's neck and he looked up at me with those eyes. Those terrible eyes-'

'It's OK, Mrs Perez. Please don't distress yourself. Jeannie, you can take Mrs Perez home now. Thank you.'

'OK, show in Mrs Abdulla.'

Will was spared the encounter with his father he had feared.

Twenty minutes after the line-up, Fitzwalter had come into the cell.

'More good news and bad news. The bad news for me is that two witnesses say you were not the man they saw in Mr Bitensky's apartment. One of them did recognize you in the line-up. She places you at the apartment building standing outside at the time of the killing. So the good news for you is that I'm going to have to let you go. For now.'

There were forms to fill in, so that Will's things could be released. He pounced on his cell phone first, powering it up.

Instantly it began vibrating: a voice message. TO.

'Hi, guess what. As predicted, I am in police custody. They're questioning me about the murder of Mr Pugachov. It seems he was shot, at point-blank range. Can you believe this? In my apartment? That sweet, gentle man. And I can't bear to think it's all because…What? Oh God, I'm sorry. Sorry, Will, that's Joel Brookstein. Do you remember him? He was at Columbia. Anyway, he's agreed to be my lawyer. He's telling me to shut my mouth. Let me know where you are and what's happening. Not sure if they'll let me keep this phone on.' Her voice faded, as if she needed to talk over her shoulder. 'All right, I'm coming. One minute! Will, I'm going to have to go. Call me as soon as you can. We don't have much time.'

As he listened to her voice — which now seemed to oscillate between TO and Tova Chaya — he heard a double beep.

A text message. He pressed the buttons.

Paul, sort the letters of no Christian! (1,? 29) In the bombardment of the last few hours, Will had almost forgotten about the phantom texter. In his mind, he still associated these messages with Yosef Yitzhok, even though he knew, rationally, that was impossible. This latest text was definitive proof: someone else had been giving Will these coded clues all along. But who?

The meaning of this latest message seemed almost within reach. Forty-eight hours of communication with this man had given Will some sense of the workings of his mind. This must be how crossword addicts do it, Will thought: after a while, they insert themselves into the head of the crossword setter.

And this did indeed look like a crossword clue. Surely, the literal meaning was irrelevant. He knew how such clues worked, with instructions in one part relating to the rest. But who was Paul? And why did the solution include a word twenty-nine letters long?

He would start with the most obvious bit, following the instruction to 'sort the letters', to reorder, 'no Christian'. With the recklessness of a newly free man, he grabbed a pen from the desk clerk's table and scribbled on the back of the receipt she had just handed him.

On Ian Christ. That did not work. Con this rain. That was not much better.

And then he saw it, smiling his first smile in hours. How perfect that this message should arrive just as he was alone, without TO. The one area where he would have greater knowledge than her.