you,’ the woman was saying to the man. The instant he heard the words, he sat bolt upright, remembering that night in the Carnegie Deli. Beth had said a beautiful sentence to him without irony, even if he had tried to pierce the moment with a joke. ‘I believe in you and me,’ she had said. He suddenly wished he had repeated the words back to Beth. For it was true. She was his faith.
The cell phone beeped.
He that knows nothing doubts nothing
This time Will read it out loud. He knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway: ‘Did you work out the first one, “He who hesitates is lost”?’
‘Not yet. He that knows nothing doubts nothing. What could that mean?’ TC was pencilling the words down, in the corner of a page already marked with drawings.
‘I don’t get it,’ Will said, chiefly for the sake of saying something. ‘It’s a contradiction. In the first message, he’s telling us not to hesitate. Just to get on with it. Now he’s saying that it’s good to doubt. You know, only a moron doesn’t experience doubt.’
‘Doubting’s not the same as hesitating.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘I don’t fucking know. I’m trying to think. He wants to tell us something. You know, “move it”. Or “think things through”. I don’t know. But he sounds like he wants to help.’
‘No. If he was trying to help he wouldn’t be talking in fucking riddles.’ Another beep.
Opportunity seldom knocks twice
As soon as Will read it out, TC began murmuring. ‘Twice is interesting. Perhaps he’s telling us to multiply something. Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe he wants us to look at the letters as numbers!’
‘What?’
‘You know, like the way text messages work, only reversed. They’re letters and words formed from numbers. Maybe this is the reverse. We’re meant to take the letters and think of them as numbers.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, one thing could be to count the number of letters in each clue. That number could be significant. Or perhaps each letter has a numeric value. You know, A is one, B is two.’
Will was baffled, but TC was ignoring him. She was scribbling away frantically on her sketchpad, wildly computing one sum after another.
More beeping; perhaps a minute after the previous one.
A friend in need is a friend indeed
Will was becoming more irritated with each message. If this was help, why did it have to be so damned opaque? Will felt like shaking young Yosef Yitzhok by his lapels: If you want to help, then just help! ‘What is this, Cliché Night? A friend in need is a friend indeed. What the hell is that? How on earth does he expect us to solve these so fast?’
‘Look, cool down, Will. Right now this is all we have. He’s all we have. Maybe he’s suddenly in a place where he can text without being seen; he might want to get all his messages out while he can.’
It was plausible; Will bit his lip. He did not want to set off a whole row with TC now, not while she was concentrating so hard on her role as unofficial cryptographer.
Will began to pace around, letting his pores fill up with the fat and grease of a burger joint – which this place was, even if it did now sell salads. He strode into a seating area where a single TV monitor was playing. Set to NY 1, the local news channel, it now flashed pictures of the Bangkok arrest of a Brooklyn rabbi on murder charges. The suspect was in the trademark garb – beard, white shirt, black suit, trilby hat – as he was handcuffed and led away by two young and scowling Thai policemen. His face seemed to be determinedly aimed downward, in shame or to avoid recognition, Will could not tell. Altogether, the sight could not have been more incongruous. That sequence was followed by footage of NYPD officers arriving on foot in Crown Heights, eschewing their usual squad cars in a gesture of ‘sensitivity’ apparently ordered by the mayor’s office.
Those pictures renewed an argument Will and TC staged several times that long afternoon.
‘I should go back there, right now.’
‘And do what? Get dunked again?’
‘No. I would tell them what I, what you, wrote in that email. That I know what they’re up to and that they should cut a deal.’
‘Too risky. You might say just the wrong thing and escalate the whole situation. The virtue of email was that we could control exactly what was said.’ Was said, the cowardly passive again. TC was obviously reluctant to admit that she had put those words in Will’s mouth.
‘I can’t just leave Beth there. Who knows what they might do now that they’re under siege. They might panic. One of those thugs could tighten the screw a bit too hard, or keep her head in water ten seconds too long—’
‘You’re doing it again. Getting into a panic. I told you, this is like climbing a mountain: you mustn’t look down. You mustn’t think about any of that. Besides, the place is crawling with police today: they wouldn’t dare do anything while they’re around. The whole vibe of those text messages from Yosef Yitzhok is that everything’s still to play for. Nothing has changed, nothing terrible has happened.’
‘Except you don’t think they’re from Yosef Yitzhok.’
‘I’m not sure, that’s all.’
That’s how it went, several times over, ending inconclusively with both TC and Will falling into a sullen or drained silence. Afterwards, Will would reflect on the fact that Beth and he never bickered. They argued but never bickered; he and TC had turned it into an Olympic sport.
Interruption came whenever a message landed. These texts, which once made Will’s chest pound with nervous anticipation, were becoming routine. Even boring. Will clicked to see the latest.
To the victor the spoils
That sounded menacing, as if the Hassidim were registering a claim on Beth: if we win, we will keep her. Will felt his hatred rising. ‘Now they’re threatening us.’
‘To the victor the spoils,’ TC repeated slowly once Will had read it out, as if she were taking dictation.
Will glimpsed what looked like a grid on TC’s sketch pad, neatly filled in with each new line from YY. ‘What have you got?’
‘The numbers things didn’t work out, so I’ve been looking at anagrams for each one. And I can get something but nothing that hangs together. There’s no pattern. I’ve tried running it as an acrostic—’
‘A what?’
‘An acrostic. Where the first letter of each sentence provides a letter of the hidden word. You know, “Roses are red” gives you R, “Violets are blue” gives you V. There are some psalms laid out like that. Put together the first letter of each line and you get another line of prayer. It was a trick: a twelve-line poem with an invisible thirteenth line.’
‘I get it. So what do we get
