The Last Testament (23 page)

Maggie pulled out her phone and saw that she had missed a call. The noise of the club had drowned it out, no doubt, dulling her senses even to the silent vibration of an incoming call. She listened to the voicemail: Davis, letting her know about Bet Alpha.

‘
An attack on a kibbutz now, Maggie. The Deputy Secretary asked me
to give you this message. “Whatever else Maggie Costello is up to, remind
her that her job is to stop relations between these two sides deteriorating
any further. Make sure she’s got that.” OK, you got it, verbatim. Sorry
to be the bearer of bad news
.’

The worst thing was, she couldn’t argue. The Deputy Secretary was right: she had to keep the lid on this violence. And she knew how it would look, her taking off on some speculative quest involving anagrams and pottery patterns. Yet she was sure that the two key deaths, Guttman’s and Nour’s, were linked.

Finding out how was surely the best way, maybe even the only way, to stop this current round of killing. The alternative was to hold an endless round of meetings where people would make the right noises – but the violence would just keep on going.

She had been round that track before and was determined not to go round again.

They were at Kishon’s apartment twenty minutes later. Eyal seemed nervous about opening up the place. After what he had heard THE LAST TESTAMENT

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about Uri’s parents, he was clearly fearful of what he might find.

He walked in first, switching on lights, calling out his father’s name.

‘Eyal, look around.’ It was Uri, scoping the apartment as if it was a movie location. ‘Look carefully. Tell us if you notice anything different, anything out of place. Anything at all.’

Maggie herself could see nothing: the place was preternatu-rally tidy. Anal was right. Mindful of her success at the Guttman house, she asked Eyal where his father worked. He directed her to a desk in the corner of the living room, while he went to check the bedroom.

‘Hey, Eyal, there’s no computer here.’

He reappeared in the doorway. ‘Oh, yeah. I forgot. He always works on a laptop. That’s the only machine he uses. Sorry.’

Damn
. In this place, as neat as a mausoleum, it had been her best hope. There were no stray pieces of paper, no piles of books to work through. This was a dead end.

She took one last look at the desk.
Think, Maggie, think
. Just a phone, a fax, a blank message pad, a picture of what she assumed was Eyal and his sister as kids, and a pen in a stand. Nothing.

She stepped away, then turned back. She pulled the pad towards her, picked it up and held it up to the light.

‘Uri! Come here!’

There, as if engraved into the page, were the inkless markings of what she hoped was Hebrew handwriting. She imagined it: Baruch Kishon taking the call from Shimon Guttman, scribbling a note on his message pad, peeling it off, rushing out the door – leaving the impression of the note on the page below.

Uri saw it, too. He held the piece of paper above his head, trying to divine its meaning through the ceiling light. He squinted and he grimaced until eventually he gave a small smile. ‘It’s a name,’ he said. ‘An Arabic name. The man we want is called Afif Aweida.’

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S E V E N

JERUSALEM, THE PREVIOUS THURSDAY

This was the sound Shimon Guttman wanted to hear, the throb of carnival. The whistles, blown repeatedly; the steady pounding of dustbin lids; the clamour that could only be generated by a group of people strong in number and, above all, strong in conviction.

He had been at a hundred demonstrations in his time, but this one made him prouder than all the rest. The crowd, gathered here at Zion Square, was enormous, a mass of people packed together, some carrying placards, the rest either waving their fists in the air or clapping in unison. They looked striking, each one of them clad in orange. T-shirts, hats, even shorts and face-paint, all in the brightest, most luminous orange. But what made Shimon tremble with pride, a glow rising from deep within, was that this massed rally against Yariv and his treachery consisted entirely of the young.

When he had issued the call, he had no idea if it would be heeded. The conventional wisdom these days held that Israel’s young had grown apathetic. They were the internet generation, more concerned with Google than the Golan, happier bumming THE LAST TESTAMENT

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around India or trekking in Nepal than pioneering in Judea or tilling the soil in Samaria. His own son, Uri, who had given up a career in army intelligence to pursue some limp-wristed job in films, was proof of the malaise.

Yet here was compelling evidence that such pessimism about the state of Israel’s youth was misplaced. Look at them, Guttman thought, massed on the streets, determined to save their nation from the surrender and appeasement plotted by their own prime minister. Those of his contemporaries who always moaned about kids today, complaining that they wouldn’t have the gumption to fight the way our lot did back in sixty-seven – they should be here now. This sight would soon shut them up.

For this was shaping up to be a fight, good and proper. Facing the army of orange, separated by a thin line of police and the odd news photographer and TV cameraman, was another crowd, nearly as packed, almost as vociferous. They had no single colour, but just as many placards as their opponents. He saw one, carefully placed near the news crews, that read simply, and in English:
Yes to Peace
.

Shimon Guttman had been at the head of the orange column –

one of only a half dozen oldies granted such elevated status – but as the trouble started, they were ushered out of the way. Partly for the seniors’ own safety, partly he suspected to allow the young men of action to get stuck in. From his vantage point on the sidelines he could see that this would soon descend into a medieval pitched battle, two armies charging at each other. All that was missing were the horses.

Soon a young man was emerging, an orange Venus from the water, out of the crowd, elevated by some hidden hand until he was able to stand unsteadily on somebody’s shoulders to deliver his speech. As the youngster barked into a megaphone, Guttman concluded that he was an inexperienced speaker, unaware that, when amplified, it wasn’t necessary to shout.

192

SAM BOURNE

Shimon was smiling, reflecting back on his younger self, when a pleasing thought dawned on him. The movement he had helped build was, after all, in safe hands. Whatever perfidy Yariv had in mind, there was a new generation ready to arise and resist. ‘I am not needed here,’ Guttman thought. He quietly withdrew, happy to let the young people get on without him. It also meant he would now gain a precious hour in a day jammed with this rally, a television debate this evening and a strategy meeting with Shapira and the settlers’ council in between. He checked his watch.

The sensible course would be to slope off to a café, have a smoke and recharge his batteries. But Guttman decided he would grant himself a rare treat. He would go somewhere else entirely.

A quick visit wouldn’t delay him too badly. As he walked through the Jaffa Gate, ignoring the kids hawking cans of soda and post-cards of the Old City, turning into the Arab market, he realized that this was his greatest weakness. Other men could be diverted from their duty by wine or women, but Shimon Guttman had only one comparable passion. Drift the scent of the ancient past before his nostrils and he would forget everything else. He would be a bloodhound, following the trail until he had found his prey.

He walked briskly down the cobbled alleys of the
shouk
, as the Israelis referred to it, a soft ‘sh’ where the Arabs would sound an ‘s’. Not that Israelis ever came here. Since the first
intifada
in the late 1980s, few Jewish Israelis dared set foot inside the Old City, except of course for the Jewish Quarter and the
Kotel
, the Western Wall. It had become a no-go area; a spate of fatal stabbings had seen to that.

But Guttman was not frightened. He believed as a matter of principle that Jews should have full access to all of their capital city, that they should not be intimidated into retreat from any part of it. That was one reason why he had left Kiryat Arba when THE LAST TESTAMENT

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he did. His comrades in the settler movement were populating the outer edges of Samaria and stretching to the beach shores of Gaza, but they were neglecting the beating heart of the Land of Israel, the heart of Zion: Jerusalem. The Israeli right were taking the eternal city for granted, not realizing that, as they stretched out their hand to liberate land elsewhere, the great pearl of Jerusalem was slipping from their grasp. If they were not careful, they would find they had lost East Jerusalem the way the British acquired an empire: in a fit of absent-mindedness.

So Shimon Guttman made it his business to travel around the mainly Arab eastern part of the city as freely as he would amble around the predominantly Jewish west. True, he didn’t come here anything like as often as, ideologically speaking, he should.

True, too, that he looked over his shoulder every five or six steps and that his heart raced the instant he left behind the smooth stone and scrubbed, lit streets of the Jewish Quarter for the dust and noise of the Arab neighbourhoods. Still, he tried to walk as relaxedly as he could given those constraints, like a man who was simply strolling in his home city. As if he owned the place.

Which, as a matter of principle, he believed he did.

There were a few shops he stopped into whenever he was in the market, which, he now realized, he had not visited for well over a year. (The campaign against Yariv had been all-consuming; everything else had slipped.) He checked in at the first, whose entrance was obscured by rail after rail of leather bags, satchels and purses. They had a pot that was intriguing, but hard to date.

The second and third shops were apologetic; they had sold the best stuff and were waiting for more. They didn’t need to spell out where these new shipments would be coming from: Iraq had transformed the entire trade. A fourth had some coins which Shimon made a note of: he would tell his friend Yehuda, an obsessive numismatist, to stop being such a wimp and take a trip down here.

194

SAM BOURNE

He was heading out when he caught a glimpse of the shop he had almost forgotten. Like the rest here, it had no front window, just a pile of merchandise outside which extended inside.

To enter was to stand in the narrow floor space that was not filled with stuff, a canyon of goods on either side. At eye level and above, there was silverware, candlesticks mainly, including several of the nine-branched variety, the traditional menorah used by Jews during the festival of Chanukah. It always struck Guttman as the ultimate in commercial pragmatism, this willingness of the Arab traders to sell Jewish kitsch.

He surveyed the shelves almost hoping there would be nothing worth seeing, so that he could hurry away and get back on schedule.

‘Hello, Professor. How nice to see you again.’ It was the owner, Afif Aweida, emerging from behind the jeweller’s counter at the far end, a glass case housing a collection of rings and bracelets on velvet beds. He offered his hand.

‘What a remarkable memory you have, Afif. Good to see you.’

‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

‘I was just passing through. Window shopping.’

Afif gestured for Guttman to follow him through the shop, up a couple of stairs into a back office. The Israeli looked around, noting the large, bulky computer, the old calculator, complete with paper printout, the layer of dust on the shelves. Times had been hard for Aweida, as they had for everyone in this area. The inhab-itants of East Jerusalem, like the Palestinians in general, were the victims of what Shimon often thought of as a bad case of divine oversight, fating them to live in a land promised to the Jews.

Afif saw Shimon check his watch. ‘You cannot wait till my son brings us some tea? You are in a hurry?’

‘I’m sorry, Afif. Busy day.’

‘OK. Well, let me see.’ He was on his feet, surveying his stock.

‘Nothing too dramatic, but there is this.’ He held out a cardboard THE LAST TESTAMENT

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box with perhaps a dozen mosaic fragments inside. Shimon rapidly arranged them, like a child’s jigsaw, to discover the shape of a bird. ‘Nice,’ he said, ‘but not really my area.’

‘Actually, there is something you can help
me
with. A new shipment arrived this week. I am told there is more where this came from, but for now, this is what I have.’ He leaned down, resting one arm on a shabby leather chair which was disgorging some of its stuffing, to pick up a tray from the floor.

On it, arranged in four rows of five across, were the twenty clay tablets Henry Blyth-Pullen had brought to him just a few days earlier. Despite Aweida’s downbeat pitch, it was not dull –

merely handling such clear remnants of the ancient past always excited Shimon Guttman – but it was hardly scintillating either.

He checked his watch: 1.45 p.m. He would get through these, then be off to Psagot for that three o’clock meeting.

‘OK,’ he said to Aweida. ‘The usual terms, yes?’

‘Of course: you’ll translate all of them and keep one. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

Aweida brought a notepad to his lap and waited. His familiar pose, the secretary taking dictation. Guttman brought the first tablet out of the tray, felt the pleasing weight of it in his palm, not much bigger than an old tape cassette. He moved it closer to his eyes, lifting his glasses to get a sharper view of the text.

He gazed at the cuneiform markings which, even in as banal a context as this, never failed to thrill him. The very idea of a written record that stretched back more than five millennia into the past was, to him, intensely moving. The notion that the Sumerians had been writing down their thoughts, their experiences, even trivial jottings, thirty centuries before Christ and that they could be read right here, on tablets no grander or more imposing than these small bars of clay, was exhilarating. He imagined himself as one of those enormous radio telescopes, arranged in rows in the New Mexico desert, their yawning wide dishes 196