City of the Lost

I

Israeli immigration was usually a bugger for Iain, his passport being so clotted with visas and entry stamps of hostile neighbours that his arrival was treated almost like a taunt. But this time they waved him through. Uri was waiting the other side, a year older, a year balder, a year fatter. ‘A word with a mate,’ he grinned, as they hugged.

‘I knew there had to be a reason I recruited you.’

He was parked short-term, a powder-blue Mercedes soft-top. He popped his jeans button and lowered his zip to give his gut room to breathe. ‘My trousers keep shrinking in the wash,’ he said.

‘Sure. That’s the only possible explanation.’

Uri tossed him a smartphone. ‘Yours for the trip, but I’ll need it back. And those pages on the dash are all I could find on your man Jakob. Seems clean enough. Born in the States but moved here young. Taught archaeology up in Haifa. Wife died a few years back, no kids. Lives up near the Lebanese border. I’m assuming you could use a driver, right?’

‘You’re a prince among men, Uri.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ He glanced over his shoulder, screeched backwards from his spot. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘The fuck’s going on? What’s this guy got to do with Mustafa?’

‘I’d tell you if I knew. I’m chasing shadows here.’

‘Then tell me about the shadows.’

‘Give me a moment. There’s something I need to do first.’ He hauled the samples case from his holdall, plugged the memory stick into Uri’s smartphone. It contained a number of image files that he began copying across. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ever heard of the Bejjani family?’

‘The bankers?’ frowned Uri. ‘Sure. How do they fit in?’

‘About a month back, we got hired to find some dirt on Butros. He’s a bugger to get close to in Tyre, as you can imagine, but one of Mustafa’s old colleagues tipped us off to a meeting in Daphne the day before yesterday. Butros Bejjani doesn’t go to meet people. They go to him. So this had to be a major swinging dick, right? We reported back to our clients, who turn out to be British intelligence, though I didn’t know that at the time. They asked us to find out more.’ The image files had all loaded, so he began looking through them. The small screen made it hard to see clearly, but the first two showed a pair of wheeled suitcases lying open on a floor, each containing what he could only presume to be artefacts, wrapped for safekeeping in clothes and tissue paper and bubble-wrap. ‘So I flew in, hooked up with Mustafa, set up some cameras outside the hotel and settled down to watch.’

‘Which was when the bomb went off?’

Iain nodded. ‘The thing is, we got Bejjani’s meeting wrong. He wasn’t there for a client. He was there sniffing after some black market artefacts. He’s a sucker for Dido, apparently; for anything Phoenician.’ He continued going through the image files as he talked, which showed the various artefacts unwrapped and held in a patch of sunlight for the photographer to shoot. They were mostly shards of pottery and the like that meant little to Iain. But, every so often, there’d be a glimpse of something different: the floor or the bed or the hands of the men holding the pieces up. There were at least two of them. Both were elderly and deeply tanned, but they were wearing different coloured shirts. One wore a gold wedding ring, the other had a faded forearm tattoo half-hidden beneath his cuff. ‘The thing is, Bejjani wasn’t the only bidder. An American oil gazillionaire called Nathan Coates and his head of security were with the dealer when the bomb went off. They were both killed in the blast, and presumably the dealer too. So maybe the bomb was planted by Cypriots, like the police are saying. They’ve bombed before and apparently they sent in a codeword. But the Cypriots are denying it furiously and — let’s face it — codewords aren’t exactly top secret. And the more I look into it, the more it’s looking like a hit.’

‘On who?’

‘That’s the question. My first thought was this guy Coates. He’s rich, his kids hate him, the bomb was parked directly beneath his room. But that didn’t pan out. So then I thought Bejjani. Maybe even our clients. That didn’t work either. Then this morning I learned that three antiquities police officers were killed in the blast too, which can’t be coincidence. They had to be there for Coates or Bejjani, either to investigate them or to sell them the pieces. So now I’m thinking that maybe they were the target. That someone got wind of their investigation and freaked out and used the Cypriots as a scapegoat.’

‘Murdering over thirty people while they were at it? Isn’t that a bit extreme?’

‘Are you telling me you haven’t witnessed worse?’

Uri grunted. ‘Not for at least a week. So how do you see it?’

‘I don’t yet. But if these antiquities police were the real target then the bombers presumably got scared of where their investigation might lead. It’s possible Coates or Bejjani could have provoked that strong a reaction, but I can’t honestly see it. Which leaves whoever was trying to flog them the pieces.’

‘And you think it was this guy Jakob?’

‘He’s an archaeologist interested in roughly the right era. He was in Turkey supposedly to visit a place called Tell Tayinat. And guess what: Nathan Coates not only sponsored the excavations there, but it’s off-season at the minute. Why would he choose now to visit?’

‘It’s a cover story,’ said Uri.

‘It’s a cover story,’ nodded Iain. ‘And I intend to find out what he was hiding.’

II

Karin tried hard not to brood on Stuttgart and safety-deposit boxes stuffed with currency. But she couldn’t help herself. She kept returning to Rick’s itinerary. He hadn’t merely changed planes there. He’d arrived in the morning, had spent the night there, then had flown on to Cyprus the next afternoon. So surely he’d taken out at least some of that cash to have on hand should Nathan decide to buy. But what had he done with it?

Along with his travel documents, Karin had Rick’s notebook and keyring. She started with the notebook: thirty-odd pages filled with sketched plans of their lodgings in Nicosia, Daphne and Istanbul, plus various sites they’d intended to visit, annotated with arrows, question marks, exclamation points and brief notes in a shorthand she didn’t recognize. Most of his keys were standard car- and house-issue, but one looked significantly more sophisticated, exactly how she’d have expected a safety-deposit box key to look. A paper tag was attached to it by a thin white thread. On one side of the tag someone had written SGAMA 16a. On the other, they’d written a date. She double-checked against Rick’s itinerary and, yes, it was the day he’d flown from Cyprus into Turkey. She sat there in disbelief for a moment or two. A fortune in cash that no one else knew about. And the key to it in her hand.

Karin was an academic by temperament and training, not particularly motivated by money. But it was one thing not to covet it in the first place, another to be unmoved when one’s income was snatched away, when one found oneself jobless, deep in debt and with uncertain prospects. Nathan’s heirs were already set to be multimillionaires, and Rick had no close family. She had a right to this money. It was severance.

The afternoon was gorgeous, perfect for walking. There were bank branches scattered either side of Antioch’s Orontes river. She entered all those she came across, looked around. None of them had vaults that she could see, or offered any explanation for the letters on the tag. She continued hunting until the working day ended and the banks closed, and she realized how tired and hungry she was. At a courtyard café, she ordered tea and a pastry, took a table beneath a willow tree and tried to make sense of Rick’s shorthand.

Two men arrived, boisterously shouting out their orders as they took the table behind her. She shifted her chair to give them more room. She became aware of a presence by the café entrance: a slim girl in a white-and-yellow summer dress darting timid looks at her. Karin smiled in invitation. She came shyly across, sat down, began speaking tangled English. A young American man, it transpired, had backpacked through the region three months before. He’d meant to stay a day; he’d ended up staying a week. They’d become friends. Good friends. Her furious blush implied just how good. It had been fun. But now he thought of it as more than fun. He kept sending her letters speaking of his love for her and pledging to return. She didn’t want him to return. Her time with him was over. She had a new friend now. She’d tried to tell him this in her letters, but he kept writing. Perhaps this was her own fault, because while she’d wanted to be clear and firm with him, she hadn’t wanted to be cruel.

Karin smiled. ‘You want me to help you write a letter?’ she asked.

The young woman nodded eagerly. ‘Is it possible?’

‘Of course,’ Karin assured her.

The young woman had a pad of paper with her. Karin took it from her then encouraged her to speak her mind. She fashioned her thoughts into a draft, then cleaned it up and handed it over.

‘Will he be hurt?’ asked the young woman.

‘Not as much as if he moves here first.’

The young woman laughed. ‘Thank you so much. It’s been such a worry.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Karin. ‘And good luck.’ The buzz of having helped a stranger energized her. It was time to get on again. She waved for her bill, reached for her day-pack. It had shifted while she’d been talking, she was sure of it. She looked around. The table behind was empty. Her heart sank to her boots. She closed her eyes. And having only got everything back a few hours ago too! She picked up her day-pack to see the damage. To her surprise and relief, everything was still there: her purse, passport, mobile, cash and Rick’s keys too. She smiled and gave her chest a little pat. Just another typical westerner, wasn’t she? Always so quick to misjudge.

III

The motorway north was fast but dull. Iain used the time to read through the briefing pack that Uri had put together on Jakob. He’d come to Israel to study Hebrew back in the 1970s, had never returned. He’d joined the faculty at Haifa University, had quietly become a respected field archaeologist and academic, specializing in the close links between early Hebrew, Phoenician and Proto-Canaanite. The pack included copies of papers he’d written on various seal-stones found on Mount Carmel, on Baal worship, on architectural styles under Omri. But though these were in English, they were written for an expert audience and Iain found them dense and hard to understand.

They turned west into a setting sun, reached Jakob’s home just after dark. A low, hunched cottage, part of a small hamlet. No lights were on, no car was parked outside. No reason to expect otherwise, but it seemed only courteous to start here. He got out and knocked. No one answered. Across the road, however, a door opened and a grey-haired woman came out, a double-barrelled shotgun held aslant her chest. Iain tried a smile and spread his hands wide. She said something he didn’t understand, Hebrew not being one of his languages. Uri got out slowly, raised a conciliatory palm, then held a brief conversation with her. ‘She thinks we’re journalists,’ he told Iain. ‘What do you want me to tell her?’

‘How about the truth?’ she mocked, in heavily accented English.

‘We’re not journalists,’ Iain assured her. ‘But we are here to investigate the bomb that killed your neighbour Jakob. Did you know him?’

‘I worked with him for twenty years. I was his neighbour for ten. Of course I knew him. But why investigate here? The bomb was in Turkey.’

‘I know,’ Iain told her. ‘I was there.’

The gun was lowered. ‘You were there?’

‘A good friend of mine was also killed. If I hadn’t gone to get us more tea, I’d have been killed too. So you can see why I want to find the people who did it.’

‘Then go to Cyprus.’

‘I don’t think it was Cypriots. I think that’s just a cover. I think it really had to do with some black market artefacts.’

Up came the gun again. ‘Are you implying Jakob was involved in the black market? Is this a joke?’

‘He was an archaeologist,’ said Iain. ‘He had access to interesting and no doubt valuable—’

‘Stop this,’ said the woman. ‘You didn’t know Jakob, so I will excuse you this insult. But the idea is absurd. He hadn’t been on a dig in years. Even if he had been, never in the whole history of the world has a man been less interested in money than Jakob. And why fly to Turkey to sell these mysterious pieces? Why not invite buyers here?’

Iain had considered this. ‘I think he needed an auction to push the price up. One of the bidders was a Lebanese banker called Butros Bejjani. Bejjani is a controversial figure. He wouldn’t have been allowed inside Israel without—’

‘Enough!’ she protested. ‘Enough! Not just selling artefacts now, but to the Lebanese!’ She broke her shotgun, beckoned them across. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let me show you Lebanon.’ They went into her house, followed her upstairs then up a wooden ladder through a trap-door onto her flat roof. She pointed to lights twinkling on a distant hill. ‘That is Lebanon there,’ she said. ‘They lob shells at us, from time to time, when they get restive. Ten years ago, one of them killed Jakob’s wife. And now you’d have him sell them Israel’s heritage?’

Iain rubbed his chin. Her certainty was persuasive. Yet he still couldn’t believe Jakob had been in Daphne by chance. An alternative occurred to him. ‘How about this, then?’ he said. ‘The other prospective buyer was an American collector called Nathan Coates who sponsored the dig Jakob supposedly went to Turkey to see. They were interested in closely related fields. Say they knew each other somehow. Say they got to like and respect each other. Then Coates is offered some important pieces slightly outside his own area, but bang in Jakob’s, so he asks him along to appraise them before he spends big money on them. And bear in mind that Coates always donates such pieces to museums. Under those circumstances, can you see Jakob helping?’

‘Under those circumstances, yes. But Turkey wasn’t his area.’

‘What was?’

She grimaced. ‘It’s not easy to explain. The early history of the Jewish people, I suppose one might say, with particular reference to the United Monarchy.’

Iain shook his head. ‘The what?’

‘The Tanakh tells us that we, the Jewish people, first came here as nomads with Abraham from Ur. There was a terrible famine, so we moved to Egypt. We were enslaved there during the Sojourn. We escaped in the Exodus. Led by Moses and then Joshua we returned here to our Promised Land. We settled across it in tribes led by judges. Division left us weak. Our enemies took advantage. We grew fed up with this and so banded together under our first king, a man called Saul. This was the start of what we call the United Monarchy. But Saul proved ineffective and was ultimately replaced by a young shepherd turned warlord named David.’

‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘Him I’ve heard of.’

‘The father of Israel,’ she said. ‘Our champion and national hero. Charismatic, smart and ruthless, as every great king should be. He united Israel, defeated our enemies, established our capital at Jerusalem. His son and successor Solomon was proverbially wise and rich. He built our first temple and founded cities across the land. It was Israel’s first flowering, a glorious era of prosperity, abundance and high culture. But it didn’t last. Solomon died, Israel split and the United Monarchy ended.’

‘And that was Jakob’s speciality? That period from Saul to Solomon?’

‘In a sense,’ she said.

‘In a sense?’

‘There’s long been a vigorous debate about how much of the Tanakh is true. Some scholars believe in every word. Others reject it almost entirely. Most fall in between, broadly holding it to be a mix of truth and folklore that becomes increasingly unreliable the further back you go. The Babylonians certainly invaded in 586 BC, for example, and the United Monarchy is typically seen as broadly historic too, though many of the stories about David and Solomon are clearly folklore. It was only before that, with the Sojourn, Exodus, Abraham and the rest, that its historicity was truly controversial. But a strange thing happened when we archaeologists started trying to reconcile the stories in the Tanakh with the physical record of the twelfth to ninth centuries BC. Because what we found shocked us.’

‘And that was?’

She smiled. ‘Israel before the United Monarchy was rich and prosperous, with a material culture every bit as fine as that later attributed to David and Solomon. And Israel after the United Monarchy mapped neatly onto the Bible accounts of Ahab, Omri and the rest. But the period of the United Monarchy itself…’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. No David. No Solomon. No cities, no palaces, no conquests. Just some scattered hill-tribes struggling grimly to survive. That’s all. This whole period, this founding narrative of our nation, this flowering of heroism, wealth and power, was in truth the poorest and most desperate in Israel’s entire history.’