The Last Testament

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

J ERUSALEM , T HURSDAY , 2.25 PM

‘Uri, I want to get out.’

‘Maggie, you’re not going anywhere.’

‘Let me out. NOW!’ Maggie only very rarely raised her voice, and she knew the sound of it was shocking. Uri finally pulled over.

‘Listen, Maggie. You can’t walk out on me now. Just because this is getting frightening.’

‘It’s you I’m frightened of, Uri.’

‘Me? Are you crazy?’

‘Whenever we’ve found a name, that person has ended up dead. First Aweida, now Kishon. And I know I didn’t kill them.’

‘So you think it was me?’

‘Well, you’re the only one who knew what I knew.’

Uri was shaking his head in disbelief, staring down at his lap, the car engine still running. ‘This is insane, Maggie. How could I have run a guy off a road in Switzerland, when I was here?’

‘You could have told someone.’

‘I didn’t know he was in Switzerland!’ He tried to collect himself. ‘Look, I just want to find out what happened to my parents. Someone killed my mother, Maggie. I’m sure of it. And I want to know who it was. That’s all.’

She felt the anxiety recede, as if the blood in her veins was subsiding. ‘But you could be passing on what you know to Israeli intelligence.’

‘Why would I do that? It was Israeli security who shot my father, remember. They may even be the people behind all this. So why would I help them?’

It was true. It didn’t make much sense: a secret agent who loses both his parents, just to maintain his cover. She had allowed herself to panic.

‘OK. I believe you. Now unlock the doors.’

He clicked them open and waited for her to get out. When he saw that she wasn’t moving, he spoke. ‘I only locked them because I need you, Maggie. I can’t do this alone.’ He held the silence a moment longer. ‘I don’t want you to go.’ She held his gaze until she saw in his eyes what she had seen there last night. The same warmth, the same spark. She wanted to dive into that look, to stay inside it. Instead she turned away, nodding, as if to signal that it was time for him to drive on.

He had driven about a hundred yards when, in a sudden movement, he reached for the volume knob on the radio and cranked it up loud. Then he re-tuned until he had found some pounding rap music. The car seemed to be shaking.

Maggie, her head hurting from the noise, reached for the same knob and turned it down, only for Uri to reach back and turn it even louder, his hand lingering there to block any attempt she might make to reverse his decision. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she shouted.

Uri looked back at her, his eyes wide as if he had made an important realization. Bugs, he mouthed silently. The car could be bugged.

Of course. Security had always been a key factor in past mediation efforts and she had, in her time, taken some extreme precautions, once briefing a Foreign Minister in a hotel bathroom while the water was running. But that was when she was dealing with negotiations. This, she had assumed, was different. Her panic over Uri and now this. She suddenly felt very stupid: her year out, nursemaiding warring couples, had left her rustier than she realized.

He was right, they needed to assume they were being bugged. When they reached a traffic light, Uri leaned across to her, so that he could whisper into her ear without his voice being picked up. ‘The computers, too.’ She could feel the words as much as she could hear them, Uri’s breath caressing her ear. She could smell his neck. ‘They will have seen whatever we saw. From now on, talk just like normal.’

He turned the music back down. ‘You don’t like it? Rap’s very big in Israel right now.’

Maggie was too thrown to play-act. If their session on Shimon Guttman’s home computer had been monitored, then whoever was doing the monitoring would know all they knew-including the truth about Ahmed Nour. And now, this morning, something had got them rattled; rattled enough to want to scare her away. By seeing Aweida, she was getting too close for their comfort.

Uri pulled over. Once they were out of the car, she began speaking immediately, only for Uri to shake his head and put his finger across his lips. Hush.

‘Yeah, there’s a really thriving music scene here now,’ he said, still in fake chat mode. ‘Mainly in Tel Aviv of course.’ He made a beckoning gesture with his hand, urging her to follow his lead.

Maggie stared at him. He was stubbled from several days without a shave, his hair loose and unkempt, the curls tumbling around his face; and now she couldn’t think of a single thing to say, about music, or anything else. Instead, she gave him a look of near-complete bafflement.

He leaned in to her ear. ‘Our clothes too,’ he whispered. Reflexively, she patted her pockets, feeling for a tiny microphone. He smiled, as if to say, ‘There’s no point, you’ll never find it.’

They were walking towards what looked like an apartment building, not the law office she was expecting. Were they calling on the Guttman family lawyer at home?

Uri pressed the buzzer by the main entrance. ‘Hi, Orli?’

Maggie heard a woman’s voice crackle through the intercom. ‘Mi zeh?’

‘Uri. Ani lo levad.’ I’m not alone.

The door buzzed open and after two flights they came to an apartment door that was already open. Framed in the doorway, looking bewildered, was a woman Maggie decided was at least five years younger than her-and unnervingly beautiful. With long dark hair that fell in easy curls, wide brown eyes and a slim figure that even loose, faded jeans could not conceal, Maggie found herself hoping this was Uri’s sister-but fearing it was his girlfriend.

Instantly, the pair embraced, a long, closed-eyes hug that made Maggie want to disappear. Were they family? Was this woman consoling Uri on his double loss? A moment later, they were inside, Maggie still standing apart, unintroduced.

Without needing direction, or asking permission, Uri made for the stereo, putting on a CD and turning up the volume. Over Radiohead, he began explaining to Orli what had happened and what he suspected. Then, to Maggie’s surprise, he pointed towards what she assumed was the bedroom, urging her to follow him. Now the three of them were in there. Still whispering over the music, Uri introduced the two women to each other, each offering an embarrassed nod and polite half-smile. Then he turned to Maggie and explained in an even lower voice that, first, Orli was an ex-girlfriend and, second, Maggie needed to get undressed.

Then in a louder, more deliberately normal voice, he continued: ‘Orli trained as a designer in London. I thought maybe you’d like to take a look at some of her latest clothes.’ He made a listening gesture, cupping his ear with his hand, then started pointing. The bug could be anywhere: shirt, shoes, trousers, anywhere.

Next, Uri opened up a cupboard and began to pull out men’s clothes. Were those his, still stored here, despite his insistence that the gorgeous Orli was an ex? Or did they belong to Orli’s new boyfriend?

She couldn’t stare for long because Orli was now standing Maggie before her own closet, assessing her up and down with the brutality women reserve only for each other. As it happened, while Maggie might not have Orli’s skinny arms, they weren’t too far apart: she would be able to fit most of the clothes on the rail.

Orli picked out a long, shapeless skirt-no mistake that, Maggie suspected. ‘What about those?’ Maggie said, indicating a pair of neat, grey trousers. She noticed a T-shirt and fitted cardigan that would complete the outfit just fine. Reluctantly, Orli handed them over. Pushing her luck, Maggie also nominated a pair of chic leather boots at the bottom of the cupboard. If she was going to wear another woman’s clothes, she thought, she might as well enjoy it.

Orli left the clothes in a pile on the corner of the bed, turned on her heel and strode off. Maggie could hardly blame her. If Edward had marched in one day with another woman, demanding that this stranger get undressed in Maggie’s apartment and then raid her wardrobe, she would hardly be delighted. Edward. They hadn’t spoken for two days.

Within a few minutes, they were saying goodbye, Orli drawing out her embrace with Uri a second or two longer than was strictly necessary. He and Maggie headed down the stairs wearing not only new clothes but, at his insistence, having ditched everything else that might contain a device: shoes, bag, pens, the lot.

‘You’d be amazed where they can put a microphone or even a camera these days,’ he said, as they walked towards the car. ‘Can of hairspray, baseball cap, sunglasses, heel of a shoe, lapel, anything.’

She looked at him.

‘We’ve done it all, for TV documentaries. Hidden camera investigations.’

‘Sure, Uri.’ She suspected this knowledge was acquired wearing the uniform of the IDF rather than in the edit suites of Tel Aviv TV-land.

Once in the car, he put the music back on and they drove in silence. It was Maggie who broke it.

‘So what’s the deal with Orli, then?’ She hoped it sounded matter-of-fact, as if she was barely bothered.

‘I told you. An ex-girlfriend.’

‘How ex?’

‘Ex. We stopped seeing each other more than a year ago.’

‘I thought you were in New York a year ago.’

‘I was. She was with me. What is this, an interrogation?’

‘No. But five minutes ago we were in the apartment of a woman I’d never met and suddenly you’re dressing me up in her clothes. I think I have a right to know who she is.’

‘So this is about your rights now, is it?’ Uri was taking his eye off the road to smile at her.

She knew how she sounded. She decided to shut up, to look out of the window and say nothing more. That lasted at least fifteen seconds.

‘Why did she dump you?’

‘How do you know she dumped me? I might have dumped her.’

‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She said she was sick of hanging around in New York waiting for me to commit. So she came back here.’

‘And is it over? Between you?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Maggie, what is this? Until this week I hadn’t spoken to her for nearly a year. She called me about my parents; said if there was anything I needed, I should call. We needed something; I called. Jesus!’

Maggie was about to apologize, to be gracious, to forgive Uri for having a beautiful ex-girlfriend, all of which were possible now that he had said what he had said, but the chance was taken from her. Her phone rang, displaying the number of the US consulate. She gestured at Uri to pull over, so that she could get out and speak, away from the car and the assorted microphones it might be concealing. The phone could be tapped, of course; a bug could even be hidden inside it. But what could she do? She couldn’t throw away her phone, she had to be contactable. And she couldn’t ignore a call from the consulate. Now standing on a street corner, she answered it.

‘Hi Maggie, it’s Jim Davis. I’m here with Deputy Secretary Sanchez and Bruce Miller.’ There was a click, as she was put on speakerphone.

‘Maggie, it’s Robert Sanchez here. Things have got a little worse in the course of the day-’

‘A little worse? A little worse?’ It was Miller, his Southern twang cutting right through Sanchez’s soft baritone. She imagined him pacing, while Davis and Sanchez sat. ‘Try a lot worse, Costello. This whole country’s burning up faster than a Klansman’s cross. Now we got the Israeli Arabs rioting: Galilee, Nazareth, Garden of fucking Gethsemane for all I know. And Hizbullah are still knocking seven bells of shit out of the north. Israelis are getting mighty restless.’

‘I understand.’

‘I hope you do, Miss Costello. ‘Cause I gotta tell ya, the President and a whole lotta other folks have put way too much into this peace process to see it turn into a pile of buffalo shit now.’

This, Maggie knew, was the kind of talk that made Bruce Miller such a force of nature in Washington, overwhelming anyone unlucky enough to stand in his way. Before he got his man elected to the White House, he was a staple on the talk shows, out-mouthing even the Bill O’Reillys and Chris Matthews with this trademark blend of farm-boy argot and cut-to-the-chase political insight. He was smart and funny at the same time; the TV producers couldn’t get enough of him.

‘We got three big motives in play here. First up, my job is to get the President re-elected in November. Peace treaty in Jerusalem makes that a sure thing. Not many of those in politics, so if you get one, you grab it. Second, Mid-East peace wins the President a place in history. He succeeds where all the others failed. I like that, too. I like that a lot.’

Maggie was smiling despite herself. In her field, euphemism and circumlocution were the standard speech patterns; undiplomatic candour like Miller’s made a refreshing change.

‘But here’s the point, Miss Costello. Usually doing the right thing and winning votes don’t go together. When LBJ gave black folks the vote, that was the right thing to do, but it screwed the Democratic Party in the South to this very day. It was right, but it fucked us in the ass. Now this is different, even a cynical old toad like me can see that. We got ourselves a chance to do the right thing and win a ton of votes doing it. And believe me, stopping the Jews and Arabs fighting after they’ve been killing each other so long, that’s the right thing to do. We owe it to them not to fuck it up.’ He paused, just to make sure his homily had sunk in. ‘So what you got?’

Maggie flannelled a while, claiming some progress on both sides, before falling back on her earlier insistence that their best shot at halting the violence would be discovering the specific cause she believed lay behind several, if not all, of the incidents. She was getting closer to uncovering that cause, but it would take time.

‘Time’s what we don’t have, Maggie.’

‘I know, Mr Miller,’ Maggie said, hearing the almost plaintive note of desperation in his voice. She felt a surge of guilt, that she had been entrusted with this vital task and she was fumbling it. Miller was not all hardball politics; behind that good ol’ boy exterior was a man who clearly yearned to make peace. And she, instead of helping, had so far achieved nothing. She hung up, promising another progress report later that night, and got back in the car, her earlier worry over Orli now seeming shamefully trivial.

For a long time she sat in silence, contemplating a much greater terror: a second, lethal failure. Uri drove on, asking no questions.

By the time they stopped outside the lawyer’s offices, the light was mellowing into afternoon. It was an old building, made of the same craggy stone that Maggie had now come to see as unremarkable, the natural material for all buildings. They walked up a single flight of stairs to a door marked ‘David Rosen, Advocate’.

Uri knocked gently, then pushed at the door. There was no one at the reception desk, though he didn’t seem too perturbed by that. ‘Probably knocked off early,’ he said, no longer in a whisper. Having shed everything he was wearing, he was confident he had now shaken off whatever bug had been pinned on him. Or her.

He called out, in Hebrew, but there was no reply. The offices seemed empty. Together they looked in at the first room: no one there. The next room was the same.

‘What time was he expecting us here?’ Maggie said, still whispering.

‘I said I would come straight over.’

‘Uri! That was ages ago. We wasted all that time at Orli’s.’

Uri poked his head around each door he could find, looking for the biggest office, the one that would belong to the senior partner. All of them were empty. As he opened the last door which, as he hoped, revealed the grandest office, his expression changed, the colour draining from his face.

Maggie walked in behind Uri, and stared. This office was not empty. David Rosen was still at his desk. But he was slumped across it, his body as still as a corpse.