The Last Testament

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 7.50 AM

The car turned through the Jaffa Gate, stopping almost immediately in a small square, a paved plaza fringed by a souvenir shop selling the usual kitsch and a couple of rundown backpacker hostels. She would have to walk from here. Maggie thanked the driver, waved him off and took a good look. In front of her was the Swedish Christian Study Centre. Close by was the Christian Information Centre and next to that, the Christ Church Guest House. A distant memory of slide shows in Sister Frances’s geography lessons rose to the surface. Maggie realized she had heard about such places long ago. These were all missions-missions to convert the Jews.

Straight ahead of her was what looked to be a central police station, complete with a tall communications mast sprouting multiple aerials. She began to walk towards it. She would report Uri missing, she would tell them about the shooting, they would send out patrol cars and find Uri and bring him back to her…

But then she stopped still. She would have to explain the stolen car and why they were being chased in the dead of night; why Uri was dressed in a stolen bellboy uniform. No one would believe a word of it. The police would immediately get on the phone to the consulate to check her out and she only had to imagine that call, as Davis, Miller and Sanchez were told that Maggie Costello had spent the night with Uri Guttman.

She stood there, frozen. If Uri was alive, he needed her help. But there was no one she could turn to, no one who would understand or believe what they now knew. Her only hope was the tablet. If she had that, she would have the answers: she would know who was behind these killings and who had Uri. If she could just find the tablet, she would have her own bargaining chip. Then all she had to do was decide how best to use it.

She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She had found this place almost suffocatingly intense as soon as she had arrived, but here in the Old City the sensation was heightened, as if all Jerusalem’s fervour, its fevered history, was cooped up between these solid, sandy walls. No wonder people spoke of Jerusalem as if it were a form of mental illness.

She stopped a man with an oversized camera around his neck, wearing sandals and socks, and asked for the Western Wall. He pointed at an archway directly opposite the Jaffa Gate. This, she remembered, was the way to the souk.

It felt like plunging down a hillside, taking that steep, downward path that had been smoothed by millions of feet over hundreds if not thousands of years. It seemed different from the market she had seen twenty-four hours ago. It was still early; almost all the stalls were locked up behind green metal shutters, and, instead of the thick crowds of tourists and shoppers, there was just a boy pushing a handcart, occasionally jumping on the small tyre he kept loosely chained to the back that, when dragged along the ground, functioned as a makeshift brake.

She looked at the names of the shops, now visible thanks to the absence of people. She could imagine the older Guttman browsing here, visiting Sadi Barakat & Sons, Legally Authorized Dealers or the grandiosely named Oriental Museum, always on the lookout for some quirky item of ancient treasure. How he must have quaked when he came into Aweida’s shop that day.

She passed a bearded man in full black robes. Was he a rabbi or an orthodox priest, maybe Greek or Russian? She had no idea and, in this city, any of those was possible. Coming from another direction, a gang of eight-year-old Arab boys and, walking around them, an old woman reading from a prayer book, muttering incantations, as if she couldn’t afford to waste even a minute away from worship of the divine.

Finally Maggie saw a simple sign in English which appeared handwritten. To the Western Wall, it said, with an arrow indicating a right turn. She followed it, heading down some more steps until she saw another more formal sign, with a series of bullet points, all in English:

You are entering the Western Wall plaza.

Visitors with pacemakers should inform the security personnel…

There was an airport-style metal detector to go through, watched by a couple of Israeli police guards. A policewoman frisked her, all the while laughing and chatting with her colleagues, and then waved her through.

And now it stretched before her, a sloping, paved plaza already teeming with people and at one end of it the solid, enormous stones of the Western Wall. It seemed to belong to another world: its scale was not human. One stone was almost as tall as a man. The weeds sprouting from its cracks were small trees. And yet this dated from a temple built here some two and a half thousand years ago.

People were milling everywhere. Bearded men striding about as if they had trains to catch, others handing out skullcaps, while still a few more were smiling, like charity collectors hoping pedestrians might stop for a chat. She avoided eye contact, listening instead as a teenaged American boy allowed himself to be buttonholed.

‘Er, Aaron.’

‘Hi, Aaron. I’m Levi.’ Lay-vee. Have you got somewhere to spend shabbes tonight?’

‘Er, maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘Do you wanna spend shabbes with a family, having chicken soup like at home? Maybe daven a little at the Kotel?’ The last word was pronounced to rhyme with hotel, though with the emphasis on the first syllable. The driver had used the same word. Kotel. The Wall.

Now she could see more clearly the sets of white plastic garden chairs arrayed in front of the Wall. There was no pattern to them. Instead, there seemed to be a dozen different gatherings and services taking place at once. It was a scene of spiritual chaos, more like a railway terminal than any shrine she had ever been to.

Perhaps four fifths along the wall a partition emerged to bisect the crowd. It wasn’t much, no different from the panels of fencing her father might have put up in their back garden. But on the left side of it, as you faced the giant stones, the crowd was much thicker. She walked closer, to work out what this division could mean.

Ah. Men on the left side, women on the right. There was another sign, addressed to the women. You are entering an area of sanctity. Women should be in appropriate modest dress. But it was the men whom she looked at. Even now, there were a good number of them, many draped in large black-and-white shawls, facing the Wall. Some let the shawls cover their heads, like boxers in hooded robes, readying for a fight. Others wore them over their shoulders. All seemed to be rocking back and forth on their heels or swaying from side to side, their eyes closed. Maggie tried to get nearer.

‘Are you Jewish?’ A matronly woman with a European accent. She was nodding and smiling.

‘No, I’m not. But I am here to join these good people’s prayers to the Lord,’ she said, the voice of Sister Olivia from school in her head. The woman gestured towards the ladies’ side of the partition and wandered off.

Maggie wondered how long she would be able to stay here before somebody moved her on. She had to find out where to go. She saw a policeman, armed, and asked for the Western Wall tunnels. He pointed at a small archway, apparently newly built into the long, but much lower, wall that ran perpendicular to the Kotel itself.

Outside was a group of maybe thirty men and women, kitted out with water bottles and video cameras. Perfect.

She loitered at the back, then followed them through the archway, her eyes down and fidgeting with her phone.

‘All right, people. If we can all listen up. Thank you,’ said the tour guide: American, late twenties, with a whiskery beard and bright, shining eyes. He clapped his hands three times and waited for silence. ‘Great. Thanks. My name is Josh and I’m going to be your guide through this tour of the Western Wall tunnels-and this journey into the ancient heritage of the Jewish people. If you just follow me through here, we can begin.’

He led them into an underground cellar, a chamber whose shape was described by a vaulted arch. The stones were colder and greyer than the ones Maggie had grown used to in Jerusalem and there was a drone of fans, struggling to dispel the smell of dry, lightless must.

‘OK, do we have everybody?’ His voice was bouncing off the walls. ‘All right. We’re in a room the British explorer Charles Warren called the Donkey Stable. That may be because that was what this room was once used for-or perhaps it just looks that way.’

There was polite laughter from all those who were not framing up a shot on their camera phones. Maggie started scoping the walls, desperate to see if there was any kind of opening, a place where Shimon Guttman might have stashed his precious discovery.

‘This gives us an opportunity to say a little about where we are. We are now very close to the area known as the Temple Mount. As you know, this is a very special place indeed. Our tradition holds that on this spot stood the Foundation Stone, from which the world was literally created five thousand seven hundred years ago. We also know it as Mount Moriah, where Abraham was asked by Ha’shem, by the Almighty, to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It’s also where Jacob laid his head to rest, and had the dream of angels moving up and down between heaven and earth. And where he predicted that the House of God would be built.

‘Sure enough, the Temple was constructed here many years later. And what you were looking at before, the Kotel, that was the western retaining wall of the temple. Which temple? Well, there were two. The First Temple was built by King Solomon nearly three thousand years ago and the Second was built by Ezra about five hundred years after that. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the only part that was left standing was the Western Wall.’

Maggie was keeping her place at the back, her eye scanning every crack between the white-grey stones. You’ll find what I left for you there, in the path of ancient warrens, Guttman had said. Could that refer to something in this room?

‘…most people don’t realize is that the giant wall we just saw outside, with everyone praying, is not the entire Western Wall. It continued on, northward, for four times as long again. Trouble was, over the years, people built against it, and eventually over it. Building layer on layer of houses and foundations and support structures. Until we couldn’t see much of the wall at all.

‘But the good news is, we’ve been able to dig out a tunnel along the entire length of the wall. Now we can see all those layers of history-and see the beauty of the wall itself, a treasure that was hidden from the Jewish people for at least two millennia.’

While the men in shorts and women with sweaters tied around their waists ooh-ed and aah-ed, Maggie was trying to guide her eye like the beam of a flashlight. Was Abraham’s tiny tablet hidden somewhere in here? She examined the ground, wondering if there was a trapdoor, a staircase perhaps, that might lead to a vault. But where?

‘OK. We’re going to follow that little light you can see there-and head down the Secret Passage.’

A teenage boy made a ghost sound. His sister sang the theme tune from The Twilight Zone.

The group walked in single file down a long corridor, beneath a low vaulted ceiling. There was no daylight now, just the orange glow of electric lights embedded at intervals along the ground. Maggie shivered, a product of shock and fatigue as much as the cold.

The guide was speaking again, his voice raised to be heard above the footsteps. The echo meant that, from her position at the back, Maggie had to strain to hear him.

‘Legend has it that this was an underground walkway used by King David so that he could travel, unseen, from his palace, which would have been west of here, to the Temple Mount…’

Maggie looked above her and at the walls. Guttman surely wouldn’t have left anything here. How would he have managed to hide it? Behind one of these stones? She began to worry. If he had loosened one of these ancient stones, and hidden the tablet behind, how on earth was she to find it? Where would she start?

The guide was answering a question. ‘That’s what I find so beautiful about being here, touching the very stones and breathing the very air that our ancestors would have touched and breathed. As we delve deeper, we can begin to reach the very roots of Jewish existence.’ His eyes were shining, two dancing beams of light. ‘We can touch our souls here.’ He left a pause while he smiled wide enough to show all his teeth. ‘OK, let’s move on.’

Maggie was feeling twitchy. The light was too weak for a proper search and, if she was to stick with this group, there was too little time in each stop along the tour. She thought of Uri, cursing his father and his elaborate schemes. Leading them here was all very well, but not if they had no chance to find the tablet.

She suddenly became self-conscious. She glanced up to see a man gazing at her, then looking away. Had she been muttering? She was so tired it wouldn’t have surprised her if, in her desperation, she had started thinking out loud. She could feel her cheeks grow hot.

The guide shepherded the group around a glass panel in the ground, which revealed they were in fact walking on a bridge, with a well-like hole directly below. ‘This is only thirteen hundred years old,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Because this is not the original bridge, but one that was added later by the Muslims.’

They walked on, until they were under another vaulted ceiling. The smell of damp was getting stronger. They were, the guide explained, walking through a series of cisterns whose arches supported the houses built above. ‘See the holes in the ceiling,’ he said, as everyone looked up. ‘They would drop a bucket from those, then pull it up, full of water.’

Maggie was barely listening, studying instead the two illuminated signs that had been placed down here: incongruously, they listed the foreign donors, the Schottensteins and Zuckermans, who had made these excavations possible. She scanned the names, looking for a Guttman or an Ehud Ramon or a Vladimir or a Jabotinsky, anything which might give her some clue. This place was so big, a maze of tunnels: how on earth was she meant to find anything here? She fully understood Uri’s exasperation with his father: why couldn’t he have been clearer?

The guide was calling them forward, to see what he introduced as Wilson’s Arch. He pointed to a small opening, through which they could glimpse again the solid oblong stones of the Western Wall, no different from those they had seen outside. Most of their view was blocked, though, by a ‘women’s prayer area’ that, even at this hour, was busy.

Enough of this, she decided. Tagging along in a tour party was never going to lead her to the tablet. She needed to search properly. And that meant alone. She walked, as quietly and unobtrusively as she could, away from the group and towards the first available opening.

It was a flight of newly-constructed metal stairs she had spotted when they came in. She went down, pressing her heel into each step to prevent her boots making the clacking noise that would give her away. At the bottom, she saw a deep rectangle that seemed to have been neatly carved out of the earth, with steps on each side. Some kind of bathing pool.

Go west, young man, and make your way to the model city, close to the Mishkan. You’ll find what I left for you there, in the path of ancient warrens.

There was nothing here that connected this place to Guttman’s clue. She moved forward, into a wider space, where a group of men in yellow hard hats were working: Arabs, Maggie couldn’t help noticing. She remembered the note in the briefing material, noting the irony that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, like Israel’s security barrier or wall, which were so hated by the Arabs, were almost always built by Arab hands.

Facing her was the newly-exposed section of the Western Wall. She skim-read the sign: five tons each, finely cut, bevelled edges and neat borders, one longer than a bus, weighs in at five hundred and seventy tons, heavier than a 747 loaded with passengers and all their luggage. Shit. When was she going to see something that made sense?

She searched for an opening. There was only one and she took it, finding herself on a narrow path, faced on one side by an enormous arch that seemed to have been bricked up, filled in with a coarse, craggy rubble. Next to it was a sign: Warren’s Gate.

Thank God for that. Guttman was not messing them around after all. Had not his clue spoken of the ‘path of ancient warrens’? Both she and Uri had taken that to mean this warren of ancient tunnels, but Guttman had been far cleverer than that. He meant this place: not warrens at all, but Warren’s. And here she was.

She looked up, down and around, confident that the hiding place was about to reveal itself. Yet all she could see was this wall of stone and brick, each piece apparently solid and unyielding. She began tapping and pulling, hoping to find a loose brick that might come away easily. None yielded.

Her confidence waning, she fell to her knees. She would work methodically, starting with the bottom line of stones. She began grabbing and tugging, the skin of her fingers scratching and tearing on the coarse brick. The wall was rock solid. Her hands moved frantically across the next line of stones, then the next. Nothing.

She stood up to look at the wall opposite. Perhaps the hiding place was here. She gazed high above and then below. Where in God’s name had Guttman hidden it?

And then she saw him.

The same man she had made eye contact with during the tour, except now he was standing, alone, at the other end of this narrow pathway. Maggie registered no embarrassment, only recognition.

She had seen his face before. But where? Her mind was so addled with exhaustion, it was like wading through deep water to find the memory. It was recent, she knew that. Just the last few days. Was it at the hotel? At the consulate? No, she suddenly realized. Oh no. It was not there at all.

It had been at the nightclub in Tel Aviv where she and Uri had tracked down Baruch Kishon’s son. Maggie had noticed him at the entrance, shortly after they had arrived. She had almost given him a sympathy smile: another thirtysomething, out of place in a club heaving with lithe and gorgeous kids. He had followed her then-and he had followed her now.

His purpose was beyond doubt. Whatever she was about to discover, he would want for himself, to pass on to God knows who. To the men who had killed Uri’s mother, Kishon, Aweida and maybe even Uri. The men who would doubtless do the same to her, right here, right now, in this catacomb of age-old secrets.