Curtis. It turned out that the red-faced cleric Will had seen on TV the other night was right: Curtis had been siphoning off colossal amounts of public money. Not just millions, which would have made him fantastically rich, but hundreds of millions at a time. Apparently the money had been diverted into a numbered account in Zurich. The humble Chancellor Curtis, riding around the British capital in a modest sedan car, had made himself one of the richest men in the world.
In his current mood, Will found even this news depressing.
It was confirmation on a grander scale of everything the last twenty-four hours had been saying. You could trust no one; everyone was up to no good. Then, as if to reproach himself, he thought of Howard Macrae and Pat Baxter. They had both done something good — but they were the exceptions.
'Will, listen.'
TO had turned the volume all the way up. Will recognized the voice: WNYC's anchor, giving the local news.
'Interpol have made a rare trip to Brooklyn this morning, with the mainly Hassidic neighbourhood of Crown Heights the scene.
Officials from the NYPD say they are working with police from Thailand on a murder inquiry. NYPD spokesperson Lisa Roderiguet says the case relates to the discovery in the Hassidic sect's Bangkok centre of the body of a leading Thai businessman.
He'd been missing for several days, believed kidnapped. The rabbi in charge of the Bangkok centre is now under arrest and the Thai authorities requested, via Interpol, that the NYPD investigate the world headquarters of the Hassidic movement, here in New York, to further their inquiries.
'The weather: in Manhattan, another chilly day…'
TO looked pale. 'I need to get out of here,' she said suddenly.
She seemed choked, claustrophobic. She moved across the room, picking up essentials — purse, phone — until Will realized this was not a negotiation. They were leaving. Watching her frightened him. There was no mistaking TO's reaction: she thought Beth had either been murdered or was about to be. He had not realized it, but TO's earlier calmness, almost insouciance, had been a comfort as well as an irritant.
Now, with TO slamming the steel concertina door of the elevator after her, jabbing the buttons to make the damn thing go faster, he was robbed of that illusion. He felt his palms grow damp: while he had been dicking around playing amateur sleuth, his beloved Beth, his partner in life, might have been strangled or drowned or shot… His eyes closed in dread. More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.
They were outside, TO grabbing him by the wrist, not so much walking alongside him as leading him, like a mother escorting a reluctant child to nursery. 'Where are we going?' he asked.
'We're going to play them at their own game. See how they like it.'
They had only walked a couple of blocks when she strode into NetZone, an internet cafe which actually served coffee.
There were copies of The New York Times, including the Sunday magazine and Arts and Leisure section, traditionally released twenty-four hours in advance, piled up invitingly by the fashionably shabby arm chairs. The Internet Hot Spot on Eastern Parkway felt very far away.
TO was not here to sip cappuccino. She was on a mission, first handing cash over and then planting Will at a free terminal.
'OK, log on.'
Will suddenly remembered what going out with TO had been like. He had always felt as if he were somehow the junior partner and she the person in charge. He used to think that was because she was the native New Yorker while he was the outsider, that he deferred to her because she knew her way around what was for him a foreign land. But he had been in America for six years now and she was still at it. He realized TO was plain bossy. 'Hold on,' he said. 'Let's talk about this first. What exactly are you suggesting I do?'
'Log on to your email and I'll show you.'
'Why do we have to do this here? Why don't we just use the BlackBerry?'
'Because I can't think using my thumbs. Now come on.
Log on.'
He relented, typing in the string of letters that enabled Times staffers to access their email remotely. Name, password and he was in: his inbox. There were no surprises, just the same list of messages he had already seen on his BlackBerry.
'Where's the last message from the kidnappers?'
Will scrolled down until he found it, the string of garble in the 'name' field and the subject: Beth. He opened it, seeing the unblinking words anew.
WE DO NOT WANT MONEY
The news from Thailand made this sentence look positively cruel. If it was not money they were after, what motivated them: the simple, sick pleasure of killing? Will could feel his blood rising, in anger — and desperation.
'OK, hit Reply.'
Will did as he was told, before TO nudged him aside and shared the seat with him, so that their bodies touched from their knees to their shoulders. She grabbed the keyboard and began two-finger typing furiously.
I am on to you. I know you must be guilty of what happened in Bangkok because I know you are doing the same here in New York. I plan to go to the police and tell them what I know. That will implicate you in at least two very serious crimes, to say nothing of your assault and false imprisonment of me. You have till nine pm tonight to give me my wife back. Otherwise I talk.
Will read the words twice over, stopping once to look at TO whose face stayed fixed on the computer screen. Her profile was just inches away from his, a minute diamond stud sparkling in her nose. He had seen this face from this angle so many times before; it seemed strange not to be kissing it.
'Christ,' he said eventually. 'That's pretty strong.' He wondered if it was too explicit, mentioning his treatment the previous night. He remembered a slew of recent trials, in the US and in Britain, where journalists' emails had been produced. What would they make of this one, issuing direct threats and proposing obstruction of justice — and all from a New York Times address? Fuck it, was all he could think. His wife was in dire danger; anything was permitted. TO's note was sharp and hit the target directly. He was about to press Send when something caught his eye.
'Why till nine pm? Why's that the deadline?'
'They might not read this till after the Sabbath is finished; we've got to give them time to reply.'
The insanity of the situation had not faded with time. The notion of pious killers, happy to murder but queasy about turning on a computer before the appointed hour was too bizarre for Will to get used to. TO had explained that the Sabbath did not officially conclude until a specific minute on Saturday evening. Nothing so imprecise as 'sunset' or 'once it's dark'. It was 7.42pm. If you did not have a watch, you could check by looking outside your window: tradition held that once you could see three stars, you knew the Sabbath was over and the normal working week had resumed.
Will had no idea how the Hassidim would respond. TO had moved so fast, her desire for action meshing perfectly with his fury at the kidnappers who, he now knew, were capable of murder, that he had barely thought through the consequences of what they had just done. Surely these were strange, unpredictable people; who knew how they would react? Will's tone of angry defiance might push them over the edge: they could decide this was provocation enough to finish Beth off. They could kill her and it would be his fault — for following the whim of, of all people, his ex-girlfriend. He imagined the pain of future years, learning to live with such a weight of guilt.
And yet, what had he got to lose? Playing nice had brought no results. He had to get their attention, force them to realize that there would be a price to pay for killing Beth. This email told them they needed his silence — and that they should spare her life to buy it.
Besides, it felt good to be fighting back. He recalled how he had felt the previous evening, when he immersed himself in the warm water of the pre-sabbath mikve as Sandy stood close by. He had been ashamed of his nakedness, his willingness to strip himself bare to ingratiate himself with men whom he should have fought as enemies. Well, now he was clothed and pulling himself up to his full height and taking them on. With this message, he was fighting for his wife and acting like a man.
He pressed Send.
