Soon they had reached a staircase. The crowds were thinning now. They moved up another flight, to a corridor empty of people. Straight into his trap, thought Will.
Rabbi Freilich led them through one door, which revealed another. But he did not go in. Instead he turned around, to offer an explanation to TO.
'I want you to know that what you are about to see is a mark of our desperation. It is a violation of Yom Kippur that has never before occurred in this building and, please God, will never happen again. We are doing it for-'
'Pikuach nefesh.' TO had interrupted him. 'I know. It is a matter of saving lives.'
The rabbi nodded, grateful to TO for her understanding.
Then he turned around, breathing in sharply through his nostrils as if bracing himself for the secret he was about to reveal. Only then did Rabbi Freilich dare open the door.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Sunday, 11.01pm, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
This place, Will realized, would normally be still on such a holy evening: no lights on, no machines in use, no phones answered, no eating, no drinking. Even Will could tell that the scene before him was an act of mass sacrilege.
It looked like the control room of a police station. Perhaps a dozen people at computers, surrounded by in- trays spilling over with paper and, on a back wall, a large wipe-board, covered with names, phone numbers, addresses. Down one side, Will could see a list of names. In a quick scan, he spotted Howard Macrae and Gavin Curtis — a line through each of them.
'No one knows about this room apart from the men working in it — and now you. We have been working in here day and night for a week. And today we lost the man who knew it best, the man who set it up.'
'Yosef Yitzhok,' said Will, noticing a pile of maps — one of them for Montana — and a stack of guide books, for London, for Copenhagen, for Algiers.
'All of this was his work. And today he was murdered.'
'Rabbi Freilich?' It was TO. 'Do you think you could start at the beginning?'
The rabbi led them to the front of the room, where a desk had been set out as if for a teacher to invigilate an exam.
The three of them sat around it.
'As you know, the Rebbe in his later years spoke often about Moshiach, about the Messiah. He gave long talks at our weekly farbrengen touching on this theme. Tova Chaya will also know how we preserved those talks for posterity.'
TO took her cue. 'Because he spoke on the sabbath, the Rebbe could not be tape-recorded or filmed. That's not allowed. So we relied on an ancient system. In the synagogue would be three or four people chosen for their amazing memories.
They would stand just a few yards away from the Rebbe, usually with their eyes closed, listening to every word, memorizing what he said. Then, the minute the sabbath was over they would gather together and kind of spew out their memories, while one of them would scribble it all down. They would get it out of their heads as quickly as they could. While they were doing it, they would check what they remembered against each other, adding a word here, correcting a word there. I can still picture it: these guys were incredible. They could listen to a three- hour speech by the Rebbe and recite it off by heart. They were called choyzers, literally 'returners'.
The Rebbe would say it, they would play it back. They were human tape recorders.'
'And, Tova Chaya, do you remember who was the most brilliant choyzer of them all?'
TO's eyes suddenly widened, as a long-buried memory came back. 'But he was just a boy.'
'It's true. But he became a choyzer soon after he had reached the age of Bar Mitzvah. He was just thirteen when he began relaying the words of the Rebbe. He had a special gift.' Freilich faced Will. 'We are speaking about Yosef Yitzhok.'
'He could memorize whole speeches, just like that?'
'He always said he could not memorize whole speeches.
Only the words of the Rebbe. When the Rebbe spoke, he would make himself, his own thoughts, disappear. He would try to insert himself into the mind of the Rebbe, to become an extension of him. That was his technique. No one else could do it the way he could. The Rebbe had a special affection for him.' Rabbi Freilich rolled back into his seat, his eyes closed. Will could only guess, but this grief looked genuine.
'As I said, in the last few years, the Rebbe began to speak more and more about Moshiach. Telling us to prepare for the coming of Messiah, reminding us that Messiah was a central belief in Judaism. That it was not some abstract, remote point of theology but that it was real. He wanted us to believe it, that Moshiach could be with us in the here and now.
'No one knew this teaching of the Rebbe's better than Yosef Yitzhok. He heard it week after week. But it was more than hearing. It was absorbing. He was ingesting this material, taking it into himself. And then, in the last days of the Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhok — who was a brilliant scholar in his own right noticed something.
'He thought back to all the talks the Rebbe had given on the theme of the Messianic age and he discerned a pattern.
Very often the Rebbe would quote a pasuk-'
'A verse.'
'Thank you, Tova Chaya. Yes, the Rebbe would quote a verse from Deuteronomy. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.'
'Justice, justice shall you pursue,' TO murmured.
'The English translation the books give is, 'Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you'. But it was that word, tzedek, that caught Yosef Yitzhok's attention. To use it so often, and always in the same context. It was as if the Rebbe was reminding us of something.'
'He wanted you to remember the tzaddikim. The righteous men.'
'That's what Yosef Yitzhok thought. So he went back through the texts, examining them intensely. And that's how he saw something else, something even more intriguing.'
Will leaned forward, his eyes boring into the rabbi's.
In close proximity to the quotation — tzedek, tzedek tirdofhe would offer another quotation. Not the same one every time, but from the same two sources. Either he would cite the Book of Proverbs-'
'Chapter ten?'
'Yes, Mr Monroe. Chapter ten. That's right. You knew all this already?'
'Think of it as an informed guess. Don't let me interrupt you; please, continue.'
'Well, as you say, the Rebbe would either quote a verse from Proverbs, Chapter 10, or he would quote from the prophets. Specifically, Isaiah, Chapter 30. Now that got Yosef Yitzhok very excited. Because kabbalists know one important thing about Isaiah, Chapter 30, Verse 18. It ends with the word lo, the Hebrew for 'for him'. The full phrase is 'blessed are all they who wait for Him'. But the real significance of the word-'
'-is the way it is spelled.'
'Tova Chaya has beaten me to it. The word lo is made up of two characters, Mr Monroe. Lamad and vav. It spells thirty six. Now the Rebbe was a careful speaker. He did not say things by accident. He did not pull quotations out of the air.
Yosef Yitzhok was convinced there was a deliberate intent.
'So he went through every transcript. And, sure enough, the Rebbe spoke of tzedek, followed immediately by a verse from one of those two chapters, thirty-five times. By that method, he left us with thirty-five different verses.'
'But-'
'I know what you're thinking, Mr Monroe, and you are right. There are thirty-six righteous men. We'll come to that.
For the moment, Yosef Yitzhok has thirty-five verses, staring at him from the page. He wonders what they could mean.
