Unexpectedly, he rose to his feet and made for the front door. He put on his trilby and his coat and, without another word, gestured for TC and Will to follow him.
Outside was a quiet Will had never experienced in a city. The streets were desolate. No cars travelled because the Yom Kippur restrictions prohibited all driving. A few knots of young men walked together, wearing their prayer shawls. Even though the evening was warm and people were out together, the atmosphere was not festive. Instead, Crown Heights seemed to be under a blanket of contemplation and silent thought; it was as if the whole neighbourhood was a single, roofless synagogue. Will felt grateful for his costume, so that he could move through this extraordinary atmosphere without breaking the spell.
They were, Will now understood, moving towards the synagogue. Once again, he wondered if he and TC were walking voluntarily into the wolf’s lair – with the wolf as their guide.
But they did not go inside the main entrance. Instead they entered a building next door, one that seemed entirely out of place in this neighbourhood. It looked like a red-brick annexe to an Oxford college, ancient by New York standards. Outside were crowds of men, spilling out from the lobby. They did not have to wade through the throng: people stepped out of the way the moment they recognized the rabbi. Will could see some raised eyebrows. He assumed they were directed at him, a face they did not know. But when he saw TC looking down at her feet, he understood: they were shocked to see a woman in this usually male terrain.
TC managed to whisper an explanation. They were entering the Rebbe’s house. This was the home the late leader had lived in and which had doubled as his office.
Will stared. He had been here before, forty-eight hours earlier.
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 TC.
‘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.’ TC had interrupted him. ‘I know. It is a matter of saving lives.’
The rabbi nodded, grateful to TC 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.
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 TC. ‘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.’
TC 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?’
TC’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,’ TC 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.