long into a 1990s style bob. She wore sensible black shoes, a long black skirt and a white blouse. She had borrowed a thick, quilted jacket of Beth’s that, in other circumstances, might have been fashionable but which now looked only practical. Standing there in his apartment was a woman who could have passed for any of the young wives and mothers he had seen in Crown Heights two days earlier. She looked like Tova Chaya Lieberman.
‘I’m so glad for the shoes. Thank God, they fit me and that’s all that counts . . .’
It took Will a moment to realize what TC was doing. She was trying out the sing-song, Yiddish-inflected accent of a New York Hassidic woman. It came to her so easily, it persuaded Will immediately.
‘Wow. You sound . . . different.’
‘This was the music of my youth, Will,’ she said, sounding like TC once more. Except there was a wistfulness in her voice he had never heard before. Then, snapping out of it: ‘Now, what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. We’re going there together. Tova Chaya wouldn’t be seen with some shaygets. You need to look the part, too. Now, come on: black suit, white shirt. You know the drill.’
Will did as he was told, finding the plainest outfit he could. He had to reject a suit with a pin-stripe and a white shirt with a Ralph Lauren polo player on the chest. Plain, plain, plain.
He looked in the mirror, hoping his transformation would be as convincing as TC’s. But his face gave him away. He might have passed for American, but Jewish? No. He had the colouring and bone structure of an Anglo-Saxon whose roots lay in the villages of England rather than the steppes of Russia. Still, that need not be a problem. Had he not seen the faces of Hanoi and Helsinki among the faithful on Friday night? He would say he was a convert.
He only needed one last thing. ‘TC, where am I going to get a skullcap from at this time of night?’
‘I already thought of that.’ With a flourish, TC held up a large black disc of material. ‘I borrowed it from your friend Sandy when we were in the park.’
‘Borrowed?’
‘Well, I knew they always carry spares. And I just happened to be glancing into one of his jacket pockets. Here, put it on.’
As if in a ceremony, TC stretched onto tiptoes and placed the yarmulke onto Will’s head. She dashed into the bathroom and came back with a hairclip. ‘There,’ she said, attaching it just so. ‘Reb William Monroe, it’s a pleasure to meet you.’
Once in the cab, Will felt himself begin to twitch with excitement – and nerves. He had never so much as attempted an undercover assignment and that’s what this had become. He was in costume, trying to pass himself off as somebody else. His protective armour – chinos, blue shirt, notebook – was gone. He felt exposed.
In a bid for reassurance, he reached for his cell phone – a memento of his regular life. A new message, apparently from the same unknown sender he had once thought was Yosef Yitzhok.
Just men we are, our number few
Describable in digits two
We’re halved if these do multiply
If we few perish then all must die.
He had no idea what it meant but it hardly mattered now. According to TC, everything was about to be explained. Habit made him check his BlackBerry next. The red light was blinking: a Guardian News Alert. Nostalgia had made him an electronic subscriber to the paper he used to read back home. Ordinarily, he rapidly deleted these email updates: he had enough to do keeping up with the news in New York and America. But that ‘alert’ did the trick: what breaking news might justify its own bulletin? He clicked it open.
The Robin Hood of Downing Street
Britain’s hottest political scandal in decades took its most bizarre turn yet today.
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gavin Curtis, who police believe took his own life last week, seems set to be transformed overnight from a disgraced hate figure into a posthumous folk hero. Treasury officials, who earlier revealed that Mr Curtis had diverted large chunks of the UK’s budget into a private Swiss bank account, have this morning disclosed where that money ended up – in the hands of the world’s poorest people.
Instantly hailed by the tabloids as a ‘real-life Robin Hood’, it seems Mr Curtis spent much of his seven years at Britain’s exchequer robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
‘Our government grant doubled, then tripled under Mr Curtis,’ said Rebecca Morris, a spokeswoman for Action on Hunger, a leading relief agency. ‘We thought it was just government policy.’
It was nothing of the kind. Instead such generosity to those fighting the wars on poverty, HIV/Aids and famine was the personal decision of Mr Curtis himself – made possible by taking money out of dormant bank accounts that had laid unnoticed and unclaimed for years and then burying the details in a bafflingly complex labyrinth of Treasury data.
Some observers speculate that the Chancellor went further in recent months, finding extra funds by raiding subsidies earmarked for Britain’s arms exporters. ‘They got less so that the starving of Africa and the sick of the Indian Ocean could get more,’ explained a ministerial ally last night. One report suggested it was this move which led to his eventual exposure.
‘He must have known the risks he was taking,’ Ms Morris told the Guardian. ‘And yet he was prepared to do all that, just so the hungriest and weakest would have a better chance. I can’t tell you how many lives Gavin Curtis must have saved. Some will call this a scandal, but I think this was the action of a truly righteous man.’
Sunday, 8.16pm, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
TC did not want to take the risk of a phone call. She feared that Rabbi Mandelbaum would be too shaken by the sound of a voice from his past. She feared, too, that he would instantly call her parents. It was likely he had been plagued by guilt during these long years: he had colluded in a secret with young Tova Chaya and look what had happened. He was bound to blame himself, for encouraging her rebelliousness when he should have curbed it. All this she imagined.
So she would turn up at his front door instead, leaving him no option. She looked at her watch: with any luck he would be back from synagogue by now. She remembered the address and, once she saw that the lights were on inside, she told the cab to wait. ‘Sorry, Will. I just need a second.’ She was staring out of the window, as if unable to move. ‘It’s been nearly ten years. I was a different person.’
‘You take your time.’
Will stared out of the window, at streets that were preternaturally quiet. Theirs was the only car; no one was out walking. The only sound came from the radio, playing a song. Will did not notice it at first, but one line of the lyric caught him. It was John Lennon, declaring that ‘God is a concept, by which we measure our pain.’ Will listened harder; the song was moving towards its climax. ‘I don’t believe in magic . . . I don’t believe in bible . . . I don’t believe in Jesus . . . I don’t believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.’
He had never heard it before, but it made his throat dry. It was as if Beth herself were speaking to him, as if she had, at last, smuggled a message out of her cell. The yearning that Will felt for his wife at that moment was so great, it was as if he was made of nothing else.
Finally, TC gave the signal to get out of the car. They paid the driver and walked towards the house. Will adjusted his skullcap. Again. TC knocked on the door. It took a while, but Will could hear activity. A slow shuffle to the door and then a hunched, grey-bearded old man. He could have been no younger than eighty.
‘Rabbi Mandelbaum,