The Last Testament

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

L AKE G ENEVA , S WITZERLAND , THE PREVIOUS M ONDAY

Officially, Baruch Kishon was meant to hate Europe. As a conservative ideologue, writing blistering commentaries for the Israeli press for nearly four decades, he had made a good living lambasting the lily-livered appeasers of the Old World, contrasting them unfavourably with the strong champions of liberty to be found in the New. While the Americans knew right from wrong, the Europeans-the French were the worst, but the British were almost as bad-sank to their knees the moment any dictator with a moustache started strutting on the podium. They had crumbled before Hitler and bowed and scraped to Saddam. And they were ready to sell out Israel the way they had been ready-eager-to betray the Jews in the 1930s. It was congenital with them. He had written as much, more than once. The European Union didn’t need a motto, concluded one of his favourite columns, just a single word: surrender.

Yet he had a dirty little secret, one common to many of the Israelis who shared his unbending brand of politics. While he may have hated everything Europe stood for, the place itself he loved. He couldn’t get enough of it: the sidewalk cafés in Paris, where the café au lait and croissants came just so; the splendour of the Uffizi or St Peter’s Square; the theatres in London’s West End, the shopping on Bond Street. After the chaos, rudeness, dust and grime of Israel, it was such a relief to come to a place that was colder, but also cooler and calmer. Where bus queues did not turn into riots and where, yes, the trains really did run on time.

Nowhere did Baruch Kishon feel this more keenly than in Switzerland, where you could eat your lunch off the railway platform and set your watch by the trains. Which is why he had felt only delight when Guttman had mentioned Geneva in that long, rambling monologue he delivered on the phone last Saturday. A call which, Kishon now believed, might well have been the Professor’s last.

He and Guttman spoke regularly. To say they were journalist and source would be too thin a description of their relationship. Their roles had blurred more than that. They were co-conspirators, kindred spirits of the nationalist camp, their foremost concern always how they might best serve the cause. If Kishon got a good story out of it, and Guttman yet more publicity, well, then that was a happy bonus. Above all, their goal was the Jewish people’s sovereignty over their historic home, the Land of Israel.

He hadn’t been surprised when Guttman called him on Saturday afternoon. Yariv was holding his big peace rally that evening; only natural that the right would need to plan its response.

But that’s not what Guttman wanted to talk about. Instead he started babbling, as excited as a teenage girl, about something that he had found, something that would change everything. The words came tumbling out: the street market in Jerusalem, cuneiform writing, clay tablets, a man called Afif Aweida, and, you’d never believe it, the last words of Abraham. Well, not the last words. But his will.

‘You mean Abraham decided who should inherit Mount Moriah, Isaac or Ishmael, us or the Muslims?!’ Kishon had spluttered down the phone. ‘And you have the proof? Where is it now?’

Guttman had sounded all but hysterical at that point, saying that they had to plan how all this would come out, that it should be them, the right-wing, who revealed it to the world. That it would be the national camp’s finest hour!

Kishon had wondered if his old friend was delirious.

‘But first we have to tell Kobi,’ Guttman had said.

‘Kobi?’

‘The Prime Minister.’

‘Have you been using some of your drop-out son’s hashish?’

No, no, Guttman had insisted, he was perfectly in control. When Kishon asked where the tablet was now, Guttman had started breathing heavily, saying that he had arranged to meet a man in Geneva. That it would be safe there. When Kishon tried to press him for more details, Guttman had rambled some more, then said he had to get to the rally. He promised he would call later. They would meet up, Guttman said. He would give all the details and together they would plan a strategy.

Several hours later Kishon had been eating in one of their favourite restaurants, a French place off Ibn Gvirol, waiting for Guttman to show up, when the newsdesk phoned. Guttman was dead, shot at the rally.

He had dropped everything, gone into the office to write a column excoriating Yaakov Yariv for creating a culture in which a political assassination like this had become inevitable. That done, Kishon knocked out a warm, personal tribute to his friend, the late Shimon Guttman.

But the next day, once it began to leak that Guttman had been unarmed, that he had been striding to the front of the rally to hand the Prime Minister a note, Kishon began to wonder. The fevered phone call his old friend had made could have been the random ramblings of a man who had flipped, in the throes of a breakdown evinced by his kamikaze attempt to buttonhole the PM. Or he might have been making perfect, albeit agitated, sense, his march to the front of the rally evidence only of the seriousness of his intent. Kishon weighed up all he knew of Guttman, the years they had worked together, the professor’s combination of steady tactical cunning and deep scholarly knowledge, the fact that he had been speaking coherently when they had talked just a few days previously-he weighed all that up and concluded that Guttman deserved to be trusted, posthumously as much as in life. Shimon had clearly made an enormously significant discovery and he owed it to his old friend to find it and show it to the world. It would be a last act of friendship. Besides, if what Guttman had said on the phone was right, it promised to be nothing less than every journalist’s dream: the scoop of the century.

Kishon tried to assemble the few elements he could remember from the phone call. He looked at the note he had scribbled while they had spoken. To his great irritation, he had written down only two words, those that were unfamiliar to him, the name of some Arab trader in East Jerusalem: Afif Aweida. The other details, he had assumed he would get later when he met up with Guttman. He hadn’t so much as jotted them down. Now he had to reconstruct them from memory: stolen antiquities, a clay tablet, Geneva, Mount Moriah. The will of Abraham.

He considered contacting Aweida, but decided against it. If he, Kishon, knew Guttman and his methods, this trader probably had no idea what he had just sold. If he had, the professor certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford it. No, a better lead would be Geneva, one of the centres of the global antiquities trade. There was a time when almost everything went through there. The Swiss took the old nemo dat doctrine-nemo dat quod non habet, ‘you can’t give what you don’t own’-rather literally, believing that if you were selling something, then you had to be its rightful owner. It meant that an object bought in Switzerland was automatically deemed legitimate, no questions asked. It didn’t matter how it had got to Switzerland. Once it left there, its provenance was deemed sound. No wonder the Swiss capital had become the laundromat for the world market in the looted treasures of the ancient world. Kishon booked a ticket online and was there by Sunday night.

Most journalists, thought Kishon smugly, would have headed straight for one of the freeports, the heavily-fortified warehouses that acted as salerooms for these ancient goodies. But Kishon knew better. Guttman would not have been interested in selling this tablet. His interest was in its political impact; he had said as much on the phone.

Which could only mean that the professor had planned to come here not to have the item valued, but verified. Guttman could not have made a declaration to the world-‘Here is proof that Abraham bequeathed Jerusalem to the Jews!’-unless he was rock-solid certain it was genuine. Too much was at stake to get it wrong. So Kishon had Googled ‘cuneiform, Geneva, expert’ and, to his delight, come up with a name. Professor Olivier Schultheis.

He would be there in another ten minutes or so. He hadn’t bothered calling in advance: no point giving a source a chance to say no. Better to turn up in person, get your foot in the door.

And the delight of these motorways was the smooth ease of the journey. Not like the congestion and fist-waving lunacy of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. But what was this? A car behind, right on his tail, flashing him repeatedly.

Kishon moved out of his way, shifting into the slower lane on the right. But the driver behind, in a black BMW, changed lanes with him, staying right on his tail. Kishon indicated again, changing once more, this time aiming for the outside, and slowest, lane.

But the BMW was sticking to him, hanging on his tail. Kishon honked the horn, urging the driver to back off. But it had the opposite effect. He felt the BMW make contact with his rear bumper.

Kishon hooted again. Back off. Now the BMW rammed into the back of Kishon’s car. He checked the mirror and looked ahead. There was no alternative. If he was to escape this psychopath, he would have to come off the autobahn and take the next turning.

It was a small, mountain road and Kishon had to negotiate the turn and the sudden deceleration. But he managed it. To his relief, he was now on his own on a single-lane, winding country road. He would stay on the little road for a while, then rejoin the highway.

But then he saw it, its black shape filling up his rear-view mirror, its headlights flashing. The BMW was back. Kishon tried to keep calm. Perhaps this car was not a stalker, but some kind of state vehicle, trying to flag him down. Had he done something wrong? Was one of his lights broken? He would pull over.

But there was no hard shoulder, just the crumbling grey rocks at the side of the road before a sheer Alpine drop. He slowed down all the same but the BMW did not seem to get the message.

Kishon honked the horn, a long, sustained blast. The BMW now revved up and rammed into the back of his car, sending Kishon’s neck whiplashing forward. He briefly lost his grip on the steering wheel, so that he could hear his tyres crunching over the loose gravel at the road’s margin. As he pulled back onto the road, he was rammed again. Then, in a sudden movement, the BMW pulled out to Kishon’s side.

He looked to his left, but the windows were solidly tinted. And now he was being rammed from the side, sending his car juddering towards the edge of the road. He could see from his window the clean, vertical drop. Just ahead, the road bent into a hairpin. Kishon knew he would need room to negotiate the turn, but the BMW would neither drop back nor speed forward. He tried to come to a stop, but each time he did, the BMW banged him from the side.

His only hope was to accelerate and break free. As the turn came he tried it, slamming his foot on the gas just as the road bent. But as he was swerving round, much too fast, the BMW shouldered him harder than ever before. It was enough to send Kishon’s right wheels over the edge. Desperately he tried steering himself back onto the road, but he could feel the difference: his car was gripping nothing, the wheels turning freely in midair.

He felt the lightness of it, as his car plunged almost gracefully off the mountainside for five, six, maybe seven seconds before hitting the first outcrop of rocks. The impact shattered his spine, and almost severed his head from his neck. When the Swiss highway patrol eventually found the wreck of his car two hours later, they had to search the rest of the night, under floodlights, until they were satisfied they had found every last trace of the flesh and bones of Baruch Kishon.