LITMIR.BIZ

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No slits

       Girls and women who wear immodest garments, and thereby call attention to their physical appearance, disgrace themselves by proclaiming that they possess no intrinsic qualities for which they should garner attention . . .

      So that explained the dress code. But the word that leapt out at Will had nothing to do with necklines or slits. It was ‘Rebbe’. This sounded like the man Will had to meet.

      He looked up to get his bearings, noticing for the first time the street sign. Eastern Parkway. He had barely walked ten yards when he saw another sign: Internet Hot Spot. He had arrived.

      His stomach heaved as he walked in. This was surely the scene of the crime. Someone had sat at one of these cheap blondwood desks, surrounded by fake wood panelling and grey floor tiles, and typed the message announcing the theft of his wife.

      He stared hard at the room, hoping his would suddenly become a superhero’s gaze, magically able to absorb every detail, seeing with X-ray vision the clues that must be here. But he only had his own eyes.

      The room was a mess, not like the latte-serving internet cafés he knew from Manhattan or even his own patch of Brooklyn. There was no espresso or mocha here, no coffee of any kind in fact. Just bunches of exposed wires, peeling signs on the wall, including a picture of an elderly, white-bearded rabbi – a face Will had now seen at least a dozen times. The desks were arranged haphazardly, with flimsy partitions attempting the separation into individual workspaces. At the back were a stack of empty computer cartons, still leaking their Styrofoam packaging, as if the owners had simply bought the equipment, unloaded it and opened for business the same day.

      Will got a few upward glances as he came in, but it was not nearly as bad as he had feared. (He had visions of his occasional student forays into out-of-the-way pubs in big English cities, places so hostile the locals seemed to fall into an instinctive, sullen silence the moment a stranger was among them.) Most of the customers in the Internet Hot Spot seemed too preoccupied to be interested in Will.

      He tried to assess each of them. He noticed the two women first, both wearing berets. One was sitting side-saddle on her stool, allowing her to keep one hand on her pram, rocking her baby to sleep as she typed with the other. Will ruled her out immediately: a pregnant woman could surely not have kidnapped his wife. He eliminated the other woman just as quickly: she had a toddler on her lap and wore perhaps the most exhausted expression he had ever seen.

      The rest of the terminals were either empty or used by men. To Will, they all looked the same. They wore the same rumpled, dark suits, the same open-necked white shirts, and the same wide-brimmed black trilby hats. Will looked hard at each one in turn – Did you kidnap my wife? – hoping that a guilty conscience might at least send one of them blushing or rushing out of the door. Instead they kept staring at the computer screens and stroking their beards.

      Will paid his dollar and sat at a screen himself. He was tempted to log onto his own email, so that anyone checking him out and reading over his shoulder would immediately know who he was. He half-wanted them to know that he was here, that he was onto them.

      Instead, he took time to absorb what was in front of him. Each terminal was programmed to show the same home page, the website of the Hassidic movement. There was a tracker on the left of the screen, scrolling birth announcements: Zvi Chaim born to the Friedmans, Tova Leah to the Susskinds, Chaya Ruchi to the Slonims. At the top of the screen was a banner, showing the same face that hung on the wall, though this time it appeared to be dissolving into a picture of the Jerusalem skyline. Underneath ran the slogan: Long Live the Rebbe Melech HaMoshiach forever and ever.

      Will read the line three times, as if trying to crack a cryptic crossword clue. He had no idea about melech but Moshiach was now very familiar, even if he had not seen it in this form. The word that mattered was Rebbe. The man in the picture that hung everywhere – an ancient rabbi with a biblical white beard and a black trilby pressed firmly on his head – was their leader, their Rebbe.

      To Will, it felt like a breakthrough. All he had to do was find this man and he would get some answers. A community like this, he was sure, would be hierarchical and disciplined: nothing would happen without the nod of the top man. He was like a tribal chief. If Beth had been taken by the men of Crown Heights, the Rebbe would have given the order. And he would know where she was now.

      Will left hurriedly, anxious to find this Rebbe as quickly as he could. As he got back onto the street, he noticed that others were moving at similar speed; everyone seemed to be in a rush. Maybe something was going on? Maybe they had heard about the kidnapping?

      Within a block or two he found what he was looking for: a place where people gathered to eat or drink. For reporters, cafés, bars and restaurants were essential locations. If you needed to talk to strangers, where else could you start? You could hardly knock on people’s front doors; stopping people in the street was always a last resort. But in a café, you could start a conversation with almost anybody – and find out plenty.

      There were no cafés here, no bars either, but Marmerstein’s Glatt Kosher would do. It was more of a dining room than a restaurant. It looked like a canteen, with hot food at a counter served by large, grandmotherly women. Their customers seemed to be gaunt, pale men, wolfing down chicken schnitzel, gravy-soaked potatoes and iced tea as if they had not eaten for twenty-four hours. It reminded Will of the refectory at his public school: big women feeding thin boys.

      Except this scene was much more bizarre. The men might have stepped out of a picture book of seventeenth-century eastern Europe and yet several of them were yammering away into cell phones. One was simultaneously tapping into a BlackBerry and reading the New York Post. The collision of ancient and modern was jarring.

      Will queued up to get his own plate, not that he felt like eating; he just needed an excuse to be there. He hesitated over his choice of vegetable, overcooked broccoli or overcooked carrots, and was soon upbraided by one of the babushkas behind the counter.

      ‘Hurry, I want to get home for shabbos,’ she said without a smile. So that explained the rush: it was Friday afternoon and the Sabbath was coming. Tom had mentioned something about that as Will left, but he had not taken it in: he literally did not know what day it was. This was bound to be bad news. Crown Heights would surely close down in the next hour or two; no one would be around and he would find out nothing. He had no choice; he would have to move fast, starting right now.

      He found what he needed: a man sitting alone. There was no time for English circumlocution. He would have to deploy the instant, American approach: Hi, how you doing, where do you come from?

      His name was Sandy and he was from the West Coast. Both of which facts caught Will by surprise. He had, half-consciously, assumed that these men with their beards and black hats would bear alien names and speak with thick Russian or Polish accents. That had been part of the culture shock of the last hour, the realization that a corner of what could have been medieval Europe lived and breathed in the here and now, in twenty-first century New York. He felt like a novice swimmer who discovers he can no longer touch the bottom.

      ‘You Jewish?’

      ‘No, I’m not, I’m a journalist.’ Ridiculous thing to say. ‘I mean, the reason why I’m here is that I’m a journalist. For New York magazine.’

      ‘Cool. You here to write about the Rebbe?’ He pronounced it Rebb-ah.

      ‘Yes. Well, among other things. You know, just writing about the community.’

      Sandy turned out to be relatively new to Crown Heights. He said he had been ‘a surfer dude’ on Venice Beach, ‘hanging out, taking a lot of drugs’. His life had been a mess until six years ago, when he had met an emissary of the Rebbe who had established an outreach centre right on the oceanfront. This Rabbi Gershon gave him a hot meal one Friday night and that was how it started. Sandy popped in there for the next Sabbath and the next; he stayed overnight with Gershon’s family. ‘You know what was best, better even than the food and the shelter?’ said Sandy, with an intensity Will found awkward in a man he had just met. ‘They

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