The Last Testament (14 page)

‘Yes. Does someone plead for something to be done and then do,’ he gestured down at the body on the ground, unable to look at it, ‘this?’

‘Maybe she had given up. Lost hope. Perhaps she got frustrated that nobody was listening to what she was saying.’

‘So she types a note on a computer. My mother, who does not know how to switch on the TV. And saying sorry to “all” of us. Not calling me and my sister by name, or at least leaving a note to

“both” of us. Believe me, I know my mother. She did not do this.’

‘So who did?’

‘I don’t know, but someone very, very wicked—’ He stopped himself before he choked. He was standing close now, almost looming over Maggie. His head of thick dark hair was scruffier than when she had seen him here yesterday, as if he had spent the intervening twenty-four hours running his hands through it over and over again. She pictured him, hunched over, bent double 112

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with grief, his head cradled in his hands. And that was before this terrible thing had happened to his mother.

He gathered himself. ‘Wicked, but also very stupid. Imagine it: a typewritten suicide note.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill your mother?’

‘For the same reason my mother wanted to talk to you.

Remember, she said that my father knew something very important, something that would change everything. Remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘So someone thought she knew this thing too. And they wanted to kill her before she told anyone else.’

‘But she insisted she didn’t know what it was. She said your father wouldn’t tell her. For her own safety.’

‘I know that. But whoever did this was not so sure.’

‘I see.’ She looked down at the floor, without meaning to.

‘Look, do you think perhaps we ought to call the police, get an ambulance maybe?’

‘First, you tell me why you came here.’

‘It . . . it seems ridiculous now. It’s not urgent. Really, you have so much to deal—’

‘I don’t believe someone working for the American government drives to a private home late at night unless there is a good reason. So you just tell me what business you had with my mother, OK?’

‘Perhaps I ought to go, leave you some time to be alone.’

He reached for her arm, yanking her back. The same spot on her wrist where his mother had grabbed her a day earlier. ‘You have to tell me what you know. I, I—’

Ordinarily, Maggie would have slapped a man who had dared grab her that way. But she could see this was not an act of aggression, but one of desperation. The composure, the haugh-tiness even, she had seen at the house yesterday had gone now.

For the first time, Maggie saw the eyes of this grieving son glisten.

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‘If you can trust me enough to tell me your name, I’ll tell you what I know.’

‘My name is Uri.’

‘OK, Uri. My name is Maggie. Maggie Costello. Let’s sit down and talk.’

Calmly, Maggie filled a glass with water from the tap and handed it over. Then she led him back out of the kitchen and sat him down, her body reeling from the adrenaline.

‘You think what happened tonight has something to do with this information, of your father’s.’

Uri Guttman nodded.

‘Do you think your father was killed deliberately, because of that information?’

‘I don’t know. Some people say so. I don’t know. But I tell you what: I will find out who did this to my family. I will find them and I will make them pay.’

She wanted to tell him that his mother’s death was almost certainly the result of horrible, intense grief. His father had been killed accidentally and now his mother had taken her own life, as simple as that. But she couldn’t say that because she wasn’t sure she believed it.

Instead, she told him what she had just discovered. That Ahmed Nour, the Palestinian archaeologist slain earlier that day, had secretly worked with his father.

At first, he refused to accept it. He sat back in his chair with the pretence of a smile, cruel and bitter. No way, he said more than once. An anagram? It was absurd. But once Maggie had explained that his father and Nour had both trained as special-ists in biblical archaeology, and once she had mentioned the unusual but recurring ceramic pattern, he fell quiet. It was clear that Maggie could have come up with no more shocking fact about Shimon Guttman. A lifelong mistress, a teenage lover, a secret family – she guessed Uri could have accepted any one of 114

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those revelations more readily than that his father might have had a working partnership with a Palestinian.

‘Look, if I’m right, it means that there may indeed be something going on here. Whatever secret it was your father was carrying, it seems to bring great harm to those who know it.’

‘But my mother knew nothing.’

‘Like you said, maybe whoever did this didn’t know that – or didn’t want to risk it.’

‘You think the same people who killed this Palestinian killed my mother?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because if they did, then I know who will be the next to die.’

‘Who?’

‘Me.’

C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

APRIL 2003, BAGHDAD

Mahmoud was regretting this decision. He should be above this now, he said to himself; as he was thrown into the air yet again, his bottom landing on the hard plastic seat of the bus as it hit the thousandth bump in the road. He should be the Mr Big who hired runners, yet here he was, working as a humble courier himself. Ten hours down, five more to go on the clapped-out old charabanc they laughingly referred to as the Desert Rocket.

For the last couple of weeks he had been working on a different business model. He would sit in the café on Mutannabi Street, waiting for pieces to come his way – and, let Allah be praised, they kept coming – and then pass them on via one of the countless boys who had emerged, like rats from a sewer, the instant Saddam was toppled. Mahmoud marvelled at the sudden proliferation of these teenage entrepreneurs. No one had planned for it; no one had ever discussed it. There had been no training; not even a rumour that there would be money to be made the day you-know-who was gone. Yet here they all came, slipping out of every backstreet and flea-ridden alley.

The trade was brisk, with mobile phones the preferred means 116

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of communication. Mahmoud would call, say, Tariq, who he knew had a shipment going to Jordan that night, telling him that he had a couple of items that needed transportation. He would hand those to one of the boys, who would run them across town. Then Tariq would pass them onto another runner, who would take the Desert Rocket to Amman. There he would meet al-Naasri or one of his rivals among the big Jordanian dealers. Al-Naasri would work out a price, and the courier would take the cash back to Iraq. Thanks to the phone network, the runners knew better than to slice off a cut. If they did, there were no shortages of ditches along the Tigris for them to fall into.

Mahmoud had been doing that profitably for a while. Business had been constant since the statue came down, but he had been close to the trade for longer than that. It was not spoken of in whispers; it was not spoken of at all, but there had been some

– how should he put it? –
movement
of antiquities since the first war, the mother of all battles, back in 1991. Until then, looting had been unheard of, but the American bombardment loosened things up a little: even Saddam couldn’t keep an eye on everything when there were Cruise missiles falling from the sky. Not that he did not come down hard on the guilty men. Mahmoud, like every other ‘dealer’ in Iraq, remembered the fate of the eleven men found guilty of sawing the face off a magnificent Mesopotamian winged bull: the beast itself was too heavy to transport anywhere. Saddam made sure it was known that he signed the death warrant for that crime himself. And, with characteristic flair, it was Saddam who decreed that these thieves should suffer the same fate they had inflicted on the mighty bronze creature. Their executioner duly took an electric saw and sliced the faces off each one of them in turn. And each, waiting for his own death, had had to watch as it came to his fellows.

When the eleventh man was killed, he had already witnessed the punishment that awaited him ten times over.

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Despite that deterrent, some grand pieces did get out.

Mahmoud never saw, but he had heard about, the section of a relief taken from the ancient Palace of Nimrod. Rather poignantly, Mahmoud thought, it depicted slaves in chains. He imagined that image, smuggled out to the West by the suffocated people of Iraq: it was like a distress signal.

The route then as now was Jordan and the conduit, then as now, was the al-Naasri family. The traffic in treasures along that path had never been heavier than it was now; trinkets and pots from every age of man, from the eras of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Persians and the Greeks. Mostly it was fragments that were taken, though the tale was told of Tariq’s boys who lugged an entire statue to Amman, stashing it in the boot of the Desert Rocket. Apparently they slipped the driver a dollar or two – and told him their cargo was only a corpse. Such was the topsy-turvy morality of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

Mahmoud had sent nearly a dozen runners to Amman in the last fortnight, each of them following the route he had taken himself when he was starting out. But something told him he was due a visit in person. He needed to see al-Naasri eyeball-to-eyeball. With business expanding at the rate it was, and the sums at stake, there were bound to be opportunities to bend the rules. Mahmoud wasn’t going to be a sucker. He wanted to be sure al-Naasri was playing it straight.

So he had filled a holdall with his latest hoard of three or four items, including a couple of ancient seals, that clay tablet he had got from the nervous man in the café and the
pièce de résistance
, a pair of gold-leaf earrings which, though it was anyone’s guess, his valuer had estimated to be four and a half thousand years old. He wasn’t about to entrust those to some spotty fourteen-year-old from Saddam City. All the more reason why he was spending fifteen hours in the company of the sputtering bone-trembler that was the Desert Rocket.

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He had dozed off in the final hours of the journey, waking up with a start when the bus juddered to a halt. He had kept the bag on his lap throughout, the handles entwined around his wrists lest the thieving scum around him get any ideas. Even before he had opened his eyes, he had patted the bag, to make sure he could still feel the shapes within; he tested its weight. As for the earrings, he knew they were somewhere completely safe.

It was midnight by the time he got off the bus. He hadn’t realized how bad it smelled until he was off it, the odour released in waves as the unwashed, exhausted passengers emerged into the night. He breathed in the Amman air, inhaling the excitement of a place that wasn’t Baghdad. Last time he had been here it had been even more thrilling: handling bank notes that did not have
his
face on them, seeing statues that depicted men other than
him
. There were no real elections here either, but at least the Jordanians had not shamed themselves by approving their tyrant with a one hundred per cent vote.

One of al-Naasri’s boys was waiting for him, bored and list-less by the railings. He said nothing, nor did he offer to take Mahmoud’s bag – not that Mahmoud would have let him – as he set off for the short walk down King Hussein Street. Before long there were signs for the Roman Amphitheatre, which meant the
souk
was close by. As they headed down the cobbled alleys, the boy increased his speed; Mahmoud had to run to keep up.

Some kind of mind game, Mahmoud decided.

Most of the stalls were closed at this time of night, their steel shutters down. The boy was turning through the market, twisting left and right, so fast that Mahmoud knew he would never be able to find his way out alone. He reached inside his suit jacket, under his arm, to check that his dagger was still there, in its leather holster.

Eventually Mahmoud caught a smell: fresh pitta bread. There must be a night bakery near here. Sure enough, the row after row THE LAST TESTAMENT

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of empty, unmanned stalls was broken by a cluster of lights just around the next corner. Tinny music was playing on a radio; men were sitting outside, drinking coffee from small cups and mint tea from glasses. Mahmoud sighed his relief. This felt like home.

The runner made his way inside, Mahmoud following. He reached the table where a man was sitting alone. The runner nodded curtly and left just as quickly. From beginning to end, he had not said a word.

Mahmoud did not recognize the man at the table. He was too young, younger than Mahmoud himself. ‘I’m sorry, perhaps there has been some mistake. I am looking for Mr al-Naasri.’

‘Mahmoud?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am Nawaf al-Naasri. I am my father’s son. Come.’

He led Mahmoud out of the coffee shop and down another alleyway. He could stab me here, thought Mahmoud, take my bag and no one would ever know.

Instead Nawaf was tapping lightly on one of the steel shutters. After a second or two, it began to crawl upward, apparently operated by some electric mechanism. Inside, fluorescent lights flickered on to reveal what looked like a souvenir shop: big glass windows and fifty-seven varieties of junk inside.

‘Come, come. Some tea?’

Mahmoud nodded as he surveyed the merchandise. Clock faces on highly-polished slices of timber; jars of coloured sand and bottles of water ‘Guaranteed from the River Jordan’. It was crap, doubtless aimed at the Christian pilgrim market. One day, Mahmoud thought, we’ll have trash like this on sale in Baghdad:

‘Guaranteed from the Gardens of Babylon’. And the tat stores in Iraq will do the same job as they do here in Jordan, serve as fronts for the antiquities business.

‘Mahmoud! A pleasure.’

He wheeled round to see al-Naasri senior beaming a wild 120

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smile. Mahmoud, who had an eye for clothes, could see that the Jordanian was wearing a well-tailored suit, the fabric hanging properly. He was ashamed of his own black leather jacket, rumpled after the marathon bus journey, its patches worn almost to baldness. It wasn’t just the suit: all over, al-Naasri had the gloss that comes with wealth. It had only been a matter of weeks since the treasure had started flowing from Baghdad, but already it seemed to have transformed Jaafar al-Naasri. Maybe serious money worked its magic fast. Whether or not that was true Mahmoud was determined to find out for himself.