LITMIR.BIZ

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you understand? That’s all I’m asking right now. Do you understand the words I am saying? If you do, then initial the goddamn form.’

      Will said no more as Fitzwalter got to the end of the form, telling him his rights. Once it was initialled, the detective pushed it to one side.

      ‘OK, now that you know your rights, do you wish to talk to us?’

      ‘Don’t I get to make a phone call?’

      ‘It’s the middle of the night. Who you gonna call?’

      ‘Do I have to tell you?’

      ‘No,’ said the detective, taking the phone from the back table and stretching its cord to place it on the desk between them. ‘Just tell me the number you want me to dial.’

      Will knew there was only one person he could possibly call but the idea was appalling. How could he, with this news? He looked at his watch. 2.15am. Fitzwalter was getting impatient.

      Will dictated the number. The detective dialled it, then handed him the phone – staying firmly in his seat. It was clear he was going to listen in on every word. Finally, Will heard the voice he was wanting and dreading to hear.

      ‘Hello? Dad?’

FIFTY-FOUR

       Monday, 3.06am, Manhattan

      ‘I have good news and bad news for you, Mr Monroe.’ It was Fitzwalter. ‘Which would you like first?’

      Will lifted his eyes slowly. He had spent only forty minutes in this cell, but it felt like forty nights. His father had told him to invoke the first of the rights he had been read and to say nothing. Once Fitzwalter was certain Will was not going to crack, and that the interview was over, he had him locked up.

      ‘The good news is that His Honour Judge William Monroe Senior has telephoned to say he is on his way in from Sag Harbor.’

      His father’s voice floated back into Will’s head now, as audible as it had been when he made that call. Sleepy, then shocked, then stern, then disappointed, then purposeful. Since Will had spent his youth three thousand miles away from his father, he had never gone through that teenage rite of passage: announcing to your father that you have in some way betrayed his trust. Dad, I trashed the car. Dad, I got caught smoking dope. These were sentences he had never had to utter. He had never heard his father say, as all his contemporaries had, ‘Son, you’ve let me down.’ So to hear it now – not the words, but that tone – was an extra ordeal, to be piled on top of all the others.

      ‘Mr Monroe, are you listening to me?’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘You’ve had the good news. Don’t you want to hear the bad news?’

      ‘Not really, no.’

      ‘The bad news is, I’ve just come off the phone with the duty lawyer at the Times. He’s made some calls and guess what? They don’t think you’re on assignment for them at all. In fact, what they say is that you’re taking a few days “rest”. By order of the editor himself. Sounds like you got yourself in a whole pile of trouble, my friend.’

      Will cupped his hands over his eyes. What a basic error: to offer a lie that could so easily be disproved. His legal defence was already compromised. He had made that cardinal mistake of all guilty men: he had changed his story. As for his career, that was surely over. He would be suspended ‘in order to defend himself on these grave charges’ – and then quietly dropped.

      The door slammed shut. In some strange way, Will almost felt grateful to be in this cell. Ever since Friday morning, he had been on the move, feverishly rushing from one place to another, from one new plan to the next. He had criss-crossed the city, in and out, either to Brooklyn or Long Island or back again, trying to think, to focus, to act. Even when sitting down, he had been willing the train or cab to go faster, to get there now, or praying for the phone to ring or an email to arrive.

      Now there was nowhere he could go and nothing he could do. The scheming and thinking and frantic calculating were at an end. His jailers had not even allowed him a pencil and paper.

      The pause let in the realization he had been resisting for days. Any time it had broken surface in the last nearly seventy-two hours, Will had pushed it back down. But now he had no strength for the task.

      Everything was falling apart. That was the conclusion he had refused to face, but which was now too strong to resist. His wife was missing, a captive of men whose fanaticism ran deep. He was about to be charged with murder, facing a pile of circumstantial evidence that would be hard to refute. Worse still, he had fallen for a classic set-up.

      After all, who had sent him to that building in the middle of the night? Was he really meant to believe it was just a coincidence that a brutal murder was in progress the minute he appeared on the scene? And how strange that the killer should almost certainly have taken refuge in, of all places, a Hassidic synagogue.

      All that guff about fearing for the end of the world. They were bringing it about themselves! Will and TC had cottoned onto their plot, so Freilich had had to come up with some bullshit about ‘whoever is behind this’ blah, blah. Will’s first instinct had been right. There was no ‘they’. The Hassidim had found the identities of these righteous men and now, for some warped reason of their own, they wanted them dead. Will was getting in the way. What better way to take him out of circulation than to have him picked up not by them, but by the police! Will had to hand it to them: it was masterful.

      How funny to think that a matter of days ago the central force in his life had been his career. His career! It was now in shreds: he had been caught engaged in gross misconduct by the editor himself. And now he had lost all standing in the eyes of the only man whose opinion really mattered: his father. He saw that now with great clarity. Of course it was bound to have affected him, growing up all those years without a dad. He felt it every day. Cricket games, when other boys were getting cheered from the boundary. Sports days, when he had no one to cheer in the fathers’ race. People used to ask if his dad was dead.

      He had gone through all the phases. He had been angry with his father; he had resented him; he had, on occasion, joined forces with his mother in hating him. But mainly he had missed him. He had missed the thing he had seen other boys get every day from their fathers: a hand on the shoulder, a tousle of the hair, a gesture that constituted male approval. Now, in this prison cell, unfogged by ambiguity and nuance, he saw more starkly than ever before why he had crossed the Atlantic and changed his life. He had come to seek his father’s approval. It was not going to find him sitting in London; he would have to come to America to get it for himself.

      He had had a plan too. He would be the bright young man in a hurry, Will Monroe, Oxford star, come to make a splash in New York City. He had imagined the day, perhaps ten years from now, when he would wear black tie, lean into a microphone positioned a few inches too low for a man of his height, and thank the Pulitzer judges for their belief in him. This very week – on the front page, twice – it had even seemed within reach. Yet now he was an exhausted wreck. The woman he loved, and the future he dreamed of, had vanished.

      Even as he engaged in this mental audit, he could feel a nagging intrusion – one more thought demanding to break the surface. Will had been pushing it below the waves more vigorously than the rest; he was hoping it would sink.

      It forced itself up. What if the Hassidim are right? What if the moment the thirty-six men are killed, the world is no longer upheld? Everything about this wild theory had stacked up so far. The Chancellor really had performed an act of stunning goodness. So had Baxter. And they were disguised just as Mandelbaum said they would be. Could all the detail be right, but the idea itself be wrong?

      Tonight he had witnessed, or just missed, the murder of a man who may well have been a tzaddik, one of thirty-six righteous ones. If that’s who this man was, then it would be one more confirmation that the Hassidim were telling the truth – or

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