The Last Testament

CHAPTER TEN

R AMALLAH , THE W EST B ANK , T UESDAY , 4.46 PM

Her first surprise was at the brevity of the journey. She had climbed into the back of one of the consulate’s black Land Cruisers only fifteen minutes earlier and yet now her driver, Marine Sergeant Kevin Lee, was telling her that she was crossing the Green Line, out of ‘Israel-proper’ and into the lands the country took in the Six Day War of 1967.

But it was an invisible border. There were no markings, no guards, no welcome signs. Instead, they were in what looked like another residential Jerusalem neighbourhood-one apartment building after another in that smooth, gleaming stone-when Lee gestured, ‘This is Pisgat Ze’ev. Even the people who live here don’t realize this is across the Green Line.’ He turned to look at Maggie. ‘Or they don’t want to realize.’

Maggie stared out of the window. No wonder everything about these negotiations was a nightmare. The plan was for Jerusalem to be divided between the two sides-‘shared’ was the favoured US euphemism-becoming a capital for both countries. But she could now see that splitting it would be all but impossible: east and west Jerusalem were like trees which had grown so close, they had become entwined. They refused to be untangled.

‘Now you get more of a sense of it,’ Lee was saying, as the road began to bend. ‘Pisgat Ze’ev on one side,’ he said, pointing to his right. ‘And Beit Hanina on the other.’ Gesturing to the left.

She could see the difference. The Arab side of the road was a semi-wasteland: unfinished houses made of grey breeze blocks, sprouting steel rods like severed tendons; potholed, overgrown pathways, bordered by rusting oil barrels. Out of the car’s other window, Pisgat Ze’ev was all straight lines and trim verges. It could have been an American suburb, cast in Biblical stone.

‘Yep, it’s pretty simple,’ said Lee. ‘The infrastructure here is great. And over there it’s shit.’

They drove on in silence, Maggie’s eyes boring into the landscape around her. You could read a thousand briefing notes and study a hundred maps, but there was no substitute for seeing the ground with your own eyes. It was true in Belfast and in Bosnia and it was true here.

‘Hold up,’ Lee said sharply, looking ahead. ‘What have we got here?’

Two thin lines of people were standing on either side of the highway.

‘Can we stop?’ Maggie asked. ‘I want to see.’

Lee pulled off the road, the gravel crunching under the vehicle’s tyres. ‘Ma’am, let me get out first. To see if it’s safe to proceed.’

Ma’am. Maggie tried to guess the difference in age between herself and this Marine Sergeant Lee. He could have been no more than twenty-two: she was, theoretically anyway, old enough to be his mother.

‘OK, Miss Costello, I think it’s clear.’

Maggie got out of the car, to see that the people were forming a line that stretched off the side beyond the road, trailing down the hillside and into the distance. In the other direction, on the other side of the road, the same thing. Some were holding banners, the rest were holding hands. It was a human chain, breaking only for the highway itself.

Now she understood it. They were all wearing orange, the colour of the protest movement that had sprung up to oppose the peace process. She looked at the placards. With blood and fire, Yariv will go, said one. Arrest the traitors, said another. The first had mocked up a portrait of the Prime Minister wearing a black and white keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress. The second had Yariv wearing the uniform of a Nazi officer, down to the letters SS on his collar.

The woman holding the keffiyeh banner saw Maggie looking. She called over: ‘You want to save Jerusalem? This is the way!’ A New York accent.

Maggie came closer.

‘We’re “Arms Around Jerusalem”,’ the woman said, handing Maggie a flier. ‘We’re forming a human chain around the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people. We’re going to stay here until Yariv and all the other criminals are gone and our city is safe again.’

Maggie nodded.

The woman lowered her voice, as if enlisting a co-conspirator. ‘If it were down to me we would have called it “Hands Off Jerusalem”. But you don’t win every battle. You should stay here a while, see what true Israelis feel about this great betrayal.’

Maggie gestured towards the car, her features crinkled into an apology. As she walked back, she could hear a song drifting up from the hillside. It was out of time, as different people in different places struggled to keep up with each other; but even so it was a haunting, beautiful melody.

As Sergeant Lee ushered her back into the car and they continued on their way, Maggie thought about what she had seen. Against opposition this committed, Yariv surely had no chance. Even if he were able to make the final push with the Palestinians, he had his own people to overcome. People who were prepared to ring an entire city, day and night, for weeks or even months.

By now they were on a smooth road with hardly any traffic on it except the odd UN 4x4 or a khaki vehicle of the Israel Defence Force, the IDF. Any other vehicles, Lee explained, belonged to settlers.

‘Where are the Palestinians?’

‘They have to get around some other way. That’s why they call this a bypass road: it’s to bypass them.’

Lee slowed down to join a checkpoint queue. A sign in English indicated who was allowed to approach: international organizations, medical staff, ambulances, press. Below that, a firm injunction: ‘Stop Here! Wait to be called by the soldier!’

The driver reached across for Maggie’s passport, wound down the window and passed it to the guard. Maggie dipped her head in the passenger seat, to get a good look at his face. He was dark and skinny, with a few random wisps on his chin. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

They were waved through, past an empty hulk of a building that Lee identified as the City Inn Hotel. It was pocked all over with bullet holes. ‘During the second intifada they fought here for weeks. Took the IDF ages to finally clear the Pals out.’ He turned to smile at Maggie. ‘I hear the room rate’s real low now.’

Just a few minutes after they had been driving through Israeli suburbia, they were in a different country. The buildings were still made of the pale stone she had seen in Jerusalem, but here they were dustier, forlorn. The signs were in Arabic and English: Al-Rami Motors, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Bank. She saw a clutch of wicker rattan chairs on a street corner, young men loafing on them, thin cigarettes between their lips. The furniture was for sale. Walking in the road, sidestepping the potholes, were children on their way from school, labouring under oversized rucksacks. She looked away.

On every wall and pasted on the windows of abandoned stores were posters showing the faces of boys and men, the images framed by the green, white, red and black of the Palestinian national flag.

‘Martyrs,’ said Lee.

‘Suicide bombers?’

‘Yeah, but not only. Also kids who were shooting at settlers or maybe trying to launch a rocket.’

The car dipped suddenly, caught by a deep pothole. Maggie kept staring out of the window. Here, as in almost every other place she had worked, the two sides had ended up killing each other’s children. It seemed everyone doing the killing or being killed was young. She always knew that, but in the last few years she couldn’t see anything else. Time after time, in place after place, she had seen it and it just sickened her. An image, the same as always, floated into her head and she had to close her eyes tight to push it away.

They threaded through crammed roads, passing a coffee shop filled with women in black headscarves. Lee dodged a couple of wagons, pulled by young boys, loaded with fruit: pears, apples, strawberries and kiwis. Everyone used the road: people, cars, animals. It was slow and noisy, horns blaring and beeping without interruption.

‘Here we are.’

They had parked by a building that looked different from the others: it was substantial, the stone clean, the glass in the windows solid. She saw a sign, thanking the government of Japan and the European Union. A ministry.

Inside, they were ushered into a wide spacious office with a long L-shaped couch. The room was too big for the furniture inside it. Maggie suspected that grandiosity had dictated the size, with practicality and need coming a remote second.

A thickset man came in carrying a plastic tray bearing two glasses of steaming mint tea, for her and her Marine escort. Maggie had seen a half dozen more men like him on her way up, sitting around like drivers at a taxi dispatch office, smoking, sipping coffee and tea. She guessed they were officially ‘security’. In reality, they were that group she had seen in countless corners of the world: hangers-on, blessed with a brother-in-law or cousin who had found them a place on the state payroll.

‘Mr al-Shafi is ready. Please, please come.’ Maggie collected her small, black leather case and followed the guide out of the room and into another, smaller one. Furnished more sparely, it looked as if proper work was done here. On one couch and in several chairs, assorted aides and officials. On the wall, a portrait of Yasser Arafat and a calendar showing a map of the whole of Palestine, including not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel itself. An ideological statement that said hardline.

Khalil al-Shafi rose from his seat to shake Maggie’s hand. ‘Ms Costello, I hear you have broken your retirement to come here and stop us children squabbling.’

The joke, and the inside knowledge it betrayed, did not surprise her. The briefing note from Davis had told her to expect a smart operator. After more than a decade in an Israeli jail, convicted not only on the usual terrorism charges but also on several counts of murder, he had become a symbol of ‘the struggle’. He had learned Hebrew from his jailers and then English, and had taken to issuing, via his wife, monthly statements-sometimes calls to arms, sometimes sober analyses, sometimes subtle diplomatic manoeuvres. When the Israelis had released him three months earlier, it had been the most serious sign yet that progress was possible.

Now al-Shafi was recognized as the de facto leader of at least one half of the Palestinian nation, those who did not back Hamas but identified with the secular nationalists of Arafat’s Fatah movement. He held no official title-there was still a chairman and a president-but nothing on the Fatah side could move without him.

Maggie tried to read him. The photos, of a stubbled face with broad, crude features, had led her to expect a streetfighter rather than a sophisticate. Yet the man before her had a refinement that surprised her.

‘I was told it was worth it. That you and the Israelis were close to a deal.’

‘“Were” is the right word.’

‘Not now?’

‘Not if the Israelis keep killing us in order to play games with us.’

‘Killing you?’

‘Ahmed Nour could not have been killed by a Palestinian.’

‘You sound very certain. From what I hear, Palestinians seem to have killed quite a lot of other Palestinians over the years.’

His eyes flashed a cold stare. Maggie smiled back. She was used to this. In fact, she did it deliberately: show some steel early, that way they’ll resist the temptation to dismiss you as some lightweight woman.

‘No Palestinian would kill a national hero like Ahmed Nour. His work was a source of pride to all of us and a direct challenge to the hegemony and domination of the Israelis.’ Maggie remembered: al-Shafi had taken a doctorate in political science while in jail.

‘But who knows what else he was doing?’

‘Believe me, he was the last person on this earth who would collaborate with the Israelis.’

‘Oh come on. We know he wasn’t a big fan of the new government. He couldn’t stand Hamas.’

‘You’re informed well, Ms Costello. But Ahmed Nour understood we have a government of national unity in Palestine now. When Fatah went into coalition with Hamas, Ahmed accepted it.’

‘What else could he say publicly? Last time I checked, collaborators weren’t wearing T-shirts with “collaborator” written on the chest.’

Al-Shafi leaned forward and looked unblinking at Maggie. ‘Listen to me, Miss Costello. I know my people and I know who is a traitor and who is not. Collaborators are young or they are poor or they are desperate. Or they have some shameful secret. Or the Israelis have something they need. None of these fit Ahmed Nour. Besides-’

‘He knew nothing.’ Suddenly Maggie realized the obvious. ‘He was a middle-aged scholar. He didn’t have any information to give.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Al-Shafi looked puzzled; he was looking for the trap. The American had folded too early. ‘Which is why it must have been the Israelis who killed him.’

‘Which would explain the strange accent of the killers.’

‘Exactly. So you agree with me?’

‘What would be their motive?’

‘The same as always, for the last one hundred years! The Zionists say they want peace, but they don’t. Peace scares them. Whenever they are close, they find a reason to step back. And this time they want us to step back, so they kill us and drive our people so mad that Palestinians will not allow their leaders to shake the hand of the Zionist enemy!’

‘If the Israelis really wanted to wind up the Palestinians, wouldn’t they kill a whole lot more people than just one old man?’

‘But the Zionists are too clever for that! If they drop a bomb, then the world will blame them. This way, the world blames us!’

Something in al-Shafi’s tone struck Maggie as odd. What was it? A false note, his voice somehow a decibel too loud. She had heard this before: once in Belgrade, a Serb official talking at the same, unnatural volume. Of course. Al-Shafi was not speaking to her, she realized. He was performing. His real audience was the other men in the room.

‘Dr al-Shafi, do you think we could talk in private?’

Al-Shafi looked to the handful of officials and, with a quick gesture, waved them out. After a rustle of papers and clinking of tea glasses, they were alone.

‘Thank you. Is there something you want to tell me?’

‘I have told you what I think.’ The voice was quieter now.

‘You’ve told me you believe that the men who killed Ahmed Nour yesterday were undercover agents of Israel.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t really believe that, do you? Is there something you didn’t want to say in front of your colleagues?’

‘Is this how you make peace, Miss Costello? By reading the minds of the men who are fighting?’ He gave her a rueful smile.

‘Don’t try flattering me, Dr al-Shafi,’ Maggie said, returning the smile. ‘You suspect Hamas, don’t you?’ Taking his silence as affirmation, she pressed on. ‘But why? Because he was a critic of theirs?’

‘Do you remember what the Taliban did in Afghanistan, just before 9/11? Something that grabbed the world’s attention.’

‘They blew up those giant Buddhas, carved in the mountainside.’

‘Correct. And why did they do this? Because the statues proved there was something before Islam, a civilization even older than the Prophet. This is something the fanatics cannot stand.’

‘You think Hamas would kill Nour just for that, because he found a few pots and pans that predated Islam?’

Al-Shafi sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘Miss Costello, it’s not just Hamas. They are under pressure from Islamists all around the world, who are calling them traitors for talking to Israel at all.’

‘Al-Qaeda?’

‘Among others, yes. They are watching what is happening here very closely. It’s possible that Hamas felt they had to show their balls-excuse me-by killing a scholar who uncovered the wrong kind of truth.’

‘But why would they disguise that as a collaborator killing? Surely they would make it look like a state execution, if they wanted to boost their standing with al-Qaeda.’ Maggie paused. ‘Unless they also wanted to make it look like Israel, so that Palestinians would be too angry to go ahead with the peace deal. Is that possible?’

‘I have wondered about it. Whether Hamas is getting, how do you say, cold feet?’

Maggie smiled. She was always wary of first impressions, including her own. But something about the knot of angst on this man’s forehead, the way his mind seemed to be wrestling with itself, made her trust him.

Al-Shafi rubbed his beard. Maggie tried to read his expression. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

He looked up, his eyes holding hers. She did not break the contact; or the silence.

At last, he got up and began to pace, staring at his feet. ‘Ahmed Nour’s son came to see me an hour ago. He was very agitated.’

‘Understandably.’

‘He said he went through his father’s things this afternoon, looking for an explanation. He found some correspondence, a few emails. Including one-a strange one-from someone he does not recognize.’

‘Has he spoken with colleagues? Maybe it’s someone he worked with.’

‘Of course. But his assistant does not recognize the name either. And she handled all such matters for him.’

‘Maybe he was having an affair.’

‘It’s a man’s name.’

Maggie began to raise her eyebrows, but thought better of it. ‘And the son thought this person might somehow be linked to his father’s death?’

Al-Shafi nodded.

‘That he might even be behind it?’

He gave the slightest movement of his head.

‘What kind of person are we talking about?’

Al-Shafi looked towards the door, as if uncertain who might be listening. ‘The email was sent by an Arab.’