habitat?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ Will croaked. The force of two men pressing their hands down on his shoulders was starting to take its toll. ‘I hope I’m not being rude, but why are you holding me like this?’
‘You know, Mr Mitchell, I’m glad you asked me that because I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression of Crown Heights or its people. We welcome guests here, we really do. We invite visitors into our homes. We are not even hostile to the press; reporters have come here often. We have had no less than the New York Times pay us an occasional visit. No, the reason for this,’ he paused, ‘unusual reception is that I don’t believe you’re telling us the truth.’
‘But I am a reporter. That is the truth.’
‘No, the truth, Mr Mitchell, is that somebody has been prying into what is strictly our business and I am wondering if that somebody is you.’ The voice, briefly raised, paused to recover its equilibrium. ‘Let’s relax a bit, shall we? It’s shabbos, we’ve all had a hard week. We’ve worked hard. Now we rest. So let’s take it slow and calm down. Back to my question. You’ve been talking to Shimon Shmuel for a while, so I’m sure you’ve picked up a few things about our customs already.’
They’ve been following me.
‘You’re an intelligent man. You’ve realized by now that observance of the Sabbath is one of our strictest rules.’
Will said nothing.
‘Mr Mitchell?’
‘Yes, I understand that.’
‘You know we are forbidden from carrying on the Sabbath, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Sandy told me. Shimon Shmuel.’ He regretted that late addition of Sandy’s Hebrew name: it sounded like an attempt at ingratiation.
‘He may not have mentioned that on the Sabbath, we are forbidden to carry but not only to carry: we are also barred from using electricity of any kind. The lights that are on now were switched on before shabbos began and they will stay on all day until after shabbos ends tomorrow night. Those are the rules: no Jew is allowed to turn them on or off. Moreover, you’ll have noticed that there were no cameras out there just now. And there have never been cameras out there, not on shabbos. What you saw just now has never been photographed or filmed. Never, and that’s not through lack of requests. Do you see where I’m heading, Mr Mitchell?’
Now that he had heard the voice speaking for longer, he began to form a picture of the speaker. He was an American, but his accent was not the same as Sandy’s. It was more, what, European? Something. Will could not quite identify what it was: certainly more New York, almost musical. It contained a kind of shrug, a recognition of the absurdity of life, sometimes comic, usually tragic. In split, fractional seconds he saw the face of Mel Brooks and heard the voice of Leonard Cohen. He still had no idea what the man speaking to him looked like.
‘Mr Mitchell, I need to know whether you understand what I’m saying.’
‘No, I don’t have a camera, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘As it happens, I wasn’t thinking about that. More on the lines of a recording device.’
Again, Will was in the clear. Despite his age, he did things the old-fashioned way: notebook and pen. This was not down to some technophobic Luddism on his part, but sheer laziness. Transcribing recordings was just too much hassle: you did an interview for half an hour, then spent an hour writing it up. The mini-disc recorder was saved only for set-piece interviews where every word was likely to count: mayors, police chiefs, that kind of thing. Otherwise he opted for paper and ink.
‘No, I haven’t recorded anyone. But why would it be a problem—’
He suddenly felt himself jerked forward and then up, the darker, younger man at his left side apparently taking the lead. The pair of them had looped their arms under Will’s armpits and levered him upward, ensuring he did not turn around. Next, the dark man swung around to face him, avoiding Will’s eye while he first stretched Will’s arms up and out, then reached under his jacket, moving his hands over Will’s shirt, around his back and under his armpits. He was like a zealous airport security guard.
Of course. Recording device. They weren’t looking for a reporter’s Dictaphone. They were looking for a wire. They were worried that he was the police or the FBI. Of course they were: they were kidnappers and they feared Will was an undercover cop. The questions he had been asking, the snooping around with no warning.
‘No wire,’ the dark man was saying, in an accent that confirmed him as at least Middle Eastern if not Israeli.
‘But there is this.’ It was the redbeard, whose task during this two-man body search, which had continued up and down Will’s legs when it was not focused on his back, had been to examine the captive’s every pocket – including the one on the inside left of his jacket. His secrets offered little resistance: his Moleskine notebook always made a neat bulge in his left breast pocket. Redbeard took it out and offered it to the unseen hand behind. Will, shoved back down into his seat, could hear the pages being turned.
The blood seemed to drain from him. His mind rewound back to Sandy’s house, when his host urged him to leave his bag behind. And Will thought he was being so clever. He had left his bag behind all right – but only after he had slipped out his notebook and zipped his wallet into what he liked to think was a concealed compartment. He had not wanted Sara Leah prying. Now the book was in the Rebbe’s hands. What a fool!
Will girded himself for the explosion. The longer the silence lasted, punctuated only by the sound of turned pages, the slicker the moisture on Will’s palms.
His mind was racing, trying to remember what was in that book that might give him away. Luckily, he was not organized enough to have written his own name on the first page or anywhere else. Walton did that, a neat inscription on the cover of each pad he used. Some reporters even used those nerdy address labels. On that score at least, Will was saved by his own inefficiency.
But what about the reams of words inside, including the copious notes he had taken today, right here in Crown Heights? Maybe those would be OK; they would at least confirm his Tom Mitchell cover story. But had he not scribbled down all that computer stuff at Tom’s earlier? Surely he had written down something about the kidnappers’ email?
The seconds lurched by, like a record playing at the wrong, too-slow speed. A hope took root. Could it be that his bastard shorthand, his unique speedwriting scrawl, was about to rescue him? He had developed this hybrid non-system of note-taking first at Columbia and then at the Record. It worked for him, though he always feared the day he was asked to produce notes for the editor, or worse still a judge in court. He imagined a defamation trial, turning on the accuracy of his written account of a conversation. He would need teams of graphologists to verify that he was as good as his words. The upside, at least at this moment, was that Will knew his notes would be all but indecipherable.
‘You’ve broken our rules, Mr Mitchell. I don’t mean our rules, as in us, the people of Crown Heights. What do we matter in the great scheme of things? We are ants! But you’ve broken HaShem’s rules.’
A sentence surfaced that instant in Will’s head. Thou shalt not bear false witness. It was, Will realized, as if he was the mere recipient of the thought rather than its source, one of the ten commandments. He knew that Jews and Christians had those in common – and that was surely what the Rebbe had in mind. This was the preamble to an accusation of lying. He was undone.
‘I think you know that we’re serious about these rules: no carrying on the Sabbath. No carrying. No wallets, no keys. No notebooks.’
‘Yes.’
‘We take these rules very seriously, Tom. They apply to our guests as much as they apply to us. I’m sure you understand that. Yet here you are, with a notebook.’
‘Yes, but that’s the only thing I took. I left the