The Last Testament

CHAPTER TWENTY

J ERUSALEM , W EDNESDAY , 1.23 PM

The drive back from Psagot had been tense. Maggie had administered a bollocking to Uri before the engine had even started. ‘Mentioning Ahmed Nour, what on earth was that for?’

‘I thought he might have something to tell us.’

‘Yeah, like “piss off before I kill both of you, too”.’

‘You think Akiva Shapira killed my parents? Are you out of your mind?’

Maggie backed off. She had to remind herself that Uri was still in the immediate shock of a double bereavement. But she was fed up with treading on eggshells. Calm self-possession and control might be the order of the day in the divorce mediation room, but not here.

‘Tell me. Why is that so crazy?’

‘You saw the guy. He’s a fanatic. Just like my dad. They loved each other, these guys.’

‘OK, so not him. Then, who?’

‘Who what?’

‘Who killed your parents? Go on. Who do you suspect?’

Uri took his eye off the road and looked at Maggie, as if in disbelief. ‘You know, I’m not used to working like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘With another person. When I make a movie, I do everything myself. Interviewing, shooting, cutting. I’m not used to having some Irish girl next to me, chipping in.’

‘I’m not “some Irish girl”, thank you very much. That kind of sexist crap may play in Israel, but not with me. OK?’

Uri shot a glance back at Maggie. ‘OK, OK.’

‘As it happens, I’m not used to it either. When I’m in the room, I’m on my own. Just me and the two sides.’

‘How come?’

‘I find it just works better that way. No aides, advisers-’

‘No, I mean how come you do this? How come you’re so good at it?’ She guessed he was trying to make amends for ‘some Irish girl’.

‘At mediation, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

She was about to tell the truth, to explain that it had been a while since she had engaged in an international negotiation, that the last dispute she had brokered had been over weekend access to Nat, Joey and Ruby George of Chevy Chase, Maryland. But she said none of that.

‘I got it from home, I suppose.’

‘Don’t tell me. Your mum and dad used to fight all the time and you became the peacemaker?’

‘No, don’t be soft.’ Though she had to admit she was impressed: as it happened, the broken home appeared in the personal histories of dozens of mediators. ‘The opposite. My parents were rock solid. Best marriage on the street. Not that that was saying much. Everyone else was rowing and fighting, husbands getting in drunk, mothers having it off with the milkman, all sorts. They used to come to my mother for advice.’

‘And you watched her?’

‘I never planned to. But couples would appear in our front room, asking my mother to arbitrate between them. “Let’s see what Mrs Costello has to say.” It became a catchphrase round our way. I watched what she did and I suppose I picked it up.’

‘She must be very proud of you.’

‘They both are.’

Uri said nothing, allowing the hum of the car to fill the void. Maggie scolded herself: it was crass to have referred to her two parents in the present tense so breezily, rubbing their aliveness in his face. But she had got carried away. It was rare for her to be asked about herself like that and she had enjoyed the chance to answer. It had probably seemed obvious to Uri, who earned his living getting people to talk about themselves, but she couldn’t remember the last time anyone else had asked, ‘How come you’re a mediator?’ It struck her that Edward had never once asked that question.

While they sped towards Jerusalem, past roads she knew were choked with Palestinians moving at a fraction of their speed, if they were moving at all, she tried to focus on the meeting with Shapira. He seemed pretty clear: Guttman had told Shapira what he had found-You don’t want to know what I know-and, Shapira believed, the Israeli government had killed him for it. But Shapira was a big, puffed-up blowhard. Why hadn’t he told Uri what his father had discovered? Maybe because she was in the room. Though that made no sense: if there was some devastating new ammunition against the peace process, he’d have seized his chance to hurl it at the Americans. Was it possible Shapira knew nothing, but simply wanted to make the Guttmans look like martyrs to the cause?

She was too lost in thought, and Uri the same, to look closely in the rear-view mirror and notice what was behind them: a white Subaru that kept three cars back. And never let them out of its sight.

They were back in the home of Shimon and Rachel Guttman. The instant Uri let them in, she shuddered. The house was not cold, but a chill hung in the air all the same. This was a place of death, twice over. She admired Uri for being able to set foot inside it.

The doormat was piled high with notes and cards: well-wishers from abroad, no doubt. Everyone else would be at Uri’s sister’s house now, where the shiva for his father would continue and where the shiva for his mother would begin once she had been buried. Maggie worried that Uri was absenting himself from a process he needed. She knew from wakes back at home that all this fuss wasn’t for the dead, but for the living, to give them something to do, to distract them from their grief. When you have to talk to two dozen relatives in an hour, you haven’t got time to be depressed. Yet here Uri was with her, denying himself that sedative for the pain.

‘In here.’ He switched on the light in a room that was, thankfully, at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen where she had discovered Rachel Guttman’s dead body the previous night. It was small, cramped and lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were also piles and piles of paper on every available surface. In the middle of a simple desk, just a plain table really, was a computer, a telephone and a fax machine with a jumble of electronic gadgetry, including a video camera, pushed to one side. Maggie checked the camera straight away: no tape inside.

‘Where on earth do we start?’

Uri looked at her. ‘Well, why don’t you quickly learn Hebrew? Then it will only take us a few months.’

Maggie smiled. It was the closest thing to laughter they had shared since they had met.

‘Maybe if you look at the computer. A lot of that was in English. I’ll start on these piles.’

Maggie settled herself into the seat and pressed the power button. ‘Hey, Uri. Can you give me the cellphone again?’

He pulled out the transparent plastic bag he had collected from the hospital on their way back from Psagot. Inside it were ‘the personal effects of the deceased’, the things his father had with him when he was killed. He passed her the phone. She switched it on, then selected the message inbox. Empty. Then the ‘sent’ box. Empty.

‘And you’re definitely sure your father used to send text messages?’

‘I told you already. He sent some to me. When I was on border duty in Lebanon, we used to text all the time.’

‘So this phone has definitely been wiped.’

‘I think so.’

‘Which means his email account is likely to have gone too. Whoever did that to your mother probably came in here too. But let’s look.’

The familiar desktop appeared on the screen. Maggie went straight for the email account. A box appeared, demanding a password. Damn.

‘Uri?’

He was clutching a bundle of papers to his chest, adding to it each time he examined a sheet from the pile on the desk in front of him. She could see progress was going to be painfully slow.

‘Try Vladimir.’

‘Vladimir?’

‘As in Jabotinsky. The founder of Revisionist Zionism. The first serious hardliner. My dad’s hero.’

She keyed in the letters slowly. Without fanfare, the screen began to fill up with email. Uri smiled. ‘He always used that. Used to write love letters to my mother under that name.’

Maggie scrolled down, looking at the unopened messages. They had kept coming, even now, since his death. Bulletins from the Jerusalem Post; a soldiers’ relief fund; circulars from Arutz Sheva, the settlers’ radio station.

She went back earlier, to those that had arrived before his death. Still the same round robins and circulars. Hold on: some personal ones. A request to speak at a demo next Wednesday. That was today. An inquiry from German TV; a request to be on a BBC radio panel. She looked further, hoping for a message from Ahmed Nour or anything which might explain the fevered words of Rachel Guttman in this very house just two days earlier. She checked the sent box, but there was not much there that stood out, and certainly no communication with Nour. How stupid could she be? With confidence, she searched for the codename she had unscrambled, Ehud Ramon, certain it would be here. Not in the inbox, not in sent messages. Nothing.

Maybe Maggie’s assumption was right. Whoever had killed Rachel Guttman had stopped in here first, methodically deleting any emails of significance. She looked in the recycle bin, just on the off-chance. Nothing in there since Saturday, the day of Guttman’s death. Which meant that either someone had hacked into this computer and was skilled enough to cover their traces-or the dead man simply avoided using email for any communication that mattered.

‘Are you certain your father used email? I mean properly.’

‘Are you kidding? All the time. Like I said, for a man his age, he is very modern. He even plays computer games, my father. Besides, he is a campaigner. They live on the internet, these people.’

That gave her an idea. She clicked the email away and looked instead for the browser. She opened it up and went straight to the favourites. A couple of Hebrew newspapers; the BBC; the New York Times; eBay; the British Museum; Fox News. Damn. Her hunch had been wrong. She shut down the browser and stared at the desktop which, at this moment, looked to her like an electronic brick wall.

She stared hard at the icons on it. A few Word documents, which she opened. She saw Yariv1.doc and her heart leapt. But it was only an open letter, in English, addressed to the Prime Minister and headed ‘For the Attention of the Philadelphia Inquirer’. Whatever it was Guttman had wanted to say to Yariv, he had not left it lying around here.

Then, at the bottom of the screen, an icon she had on her own machine but had never used. She clicked on it and saw it was another internet browser, just not a very famous one. She looked for the favourites, here called Bookmarks, and there was only one.

gmail.com

It was what she had been hoping for. An email account, separate to his main one, effectively hidden away. Here, she had no doubt, was where Guttman’s serious correspondence would be kept.

A box appeared, this time asking for both a name and a password. She typed in Shimon Guttman, with Vladimir as the password and waited. No luck. She tried Shimon on its own. Nothing. She tried lower case, upper case and then no spaces. None if it worked.

‘Uri, what would he use besides Vladimir?’

So she tried Jabotinsky, Jabo, VladimirJ and what seemed like three dozen other permutations. No luck. And then it hit her. Without pausing, she pulled out her cellphone and punched at the numbers. ‘The office of Khalil al-Shafi please.’

Uri reared back, dropping a clump of papers onto the floor as he did so. ‘What the hell do you think-’

‘Let me speak to Khalil al-Shafi please. This is Maggie Costello from the State Department.’ It was her Sunday best accent.

‘Mr al-Shafi. Do you remember you told me that Ahmed Nour had received some mysterious emails prior to his death, requesting a meeting? That’s right. From an Arab name his family did not recognize. I need you to tell me that name. It will go no further than me, I assure you.’

She checked the spelling back twice, making sure every letter was right, knowing there was no room for error. She thanked the Palestinian negotiator and hung up.

‘Do you speak any Arabic, Uri?’

‘A little.’

‘OK. What does nas tayib mean?’

‘That’s very simple. It means a good man.’

‘Or, if we were to translate it into German, a Gutt man, nein?