The Last Testament

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 10.14 AM

The driver took her the short distance to the hotel, but she didn’t want to go in straightaway. She had seen so little daylight, she just wanted to absorb some of it now. She stood and looked around.

The entrance was busy, taxis parked with their engines running, guests coming in and out with multiple suitcases. More out than in, Maggie guessed: tourists were probably abandoning Jerusalem after the troubles of the last few days. If they only knew.

She could hear a megaphone blaring. She turned around to see a white estate car, covered in orange stickers and posters, driving slowly up King David Street: inside, someone was shouting slogans denouncing, it seemed, Yariv and his imminent surrender of Israel’s patrimony. A minute later the car was joined by a van, this one blaring out a bland kind of Euro-pop. From the look of it, this was the peace camp, probably deriding Yariv for backing away from the negotiations.

She looked past the traffic lights, up the hill. The consulate’s just up there, she thought, where this whole thing began. She remembered sitting there in the garden, just off the plane, wondering about the brothers in the monastery. That had been just five days ago, though it felt more like five years. She and Jim Davis had talked about ‘closing the deal’. Maggie smiled bitterly.

She turned left, walking away from the hotel. Every part of her ached; her arms and neck especially. She imagined the bruises all over her body, even in those places you couldn’t see. She yearned for a long soak in a hot bath and a deep sleep. But she was not ready for that now: her mind wouldn’t let her rest.

She found instead a park, almost empty and looking unloved. The lawns were unkempt at the edges, the metal struts that supported a gazebo canopy in the middle had been allowed to rust. Maggie noticed that even the paving stones, and the benches, were made of that same golden Jerusalem stone: it was beautiful, but she reckoned people who lived here surely got tired of it. Like living in a town with a chocolate factory: visitors would love the smell, while the full-timers fast grew sick of it.

She sat on the bench and stared. When Miller told her she was free to go, that he had concluded she had nothing more to reveal, she had felt relief but no pleasure. It wasn’t only the pain that still throbbed through her; nor the humiliation of having been exposed, even in her most intimate parts, like some kind of animal carcass; nor even what Miller had revealed was the true nature of her mission to Jerusalem. No, what Maggie felt was something she guessed most people would not grasp. Perhaps only another mediator would understand it: the gnawing anxiety that comes when the other side has given in too easily. Miller had folded too soon and she didn’t know why.

She went over his words again and again, including the final statement he had delivered as he left the interrogation room. He warned her that if she tried to reveal what had happened, he would ensure that the Washington Post was briefed that poor Ms Costello had suffered a breakdown in Jerusalem, leaving her delusional and irrational, following a second affair while on duty. The authorities had given her a chance, after an earlier lapse had forced her to give up diplomatic work. But her curious weakness had thwarted their attempt to help. She couldn’t seem to avoid developing intimate relations with those with whom she was meant to engage professionally, administration sources would say, speaking on condition of anonymity. If she tried to fight it, they had the tapes and photographs showing her with Uri, late at night, drinking, kissing…

She shuddered and stared at her feet, in boots she barely recognized. All the time she had done this job she had refused to let her gender be the decisive fact about her. Sure, she knew her womanhood was a factor in any negotiation, sometimes a disadvantage, usually an asset, so long as you knew how to play it. But it was only one element among many, alongside her Irishness or her relative youth. It was not all she was. But Miller had made her feel differently and it repelled her. He saw her not as an experienced mediator, a skilled reader of human dynamics and a reliable analyst of international relations, but as a whore. That’s what it came down to. To him, her affair in Africa was the single most important line on her resumé. Along with her tits and her arse. She was there not for her savvy, or her intellect, or her years at assorted peace tables, but to get laid. Suddenly her manhandling in the souk felt like the least of it. She had been violated, she now understood, from the moment she took those tickets and got in the cab for Dulles Airport.

After Miller’s little speech of warning, he had surprised her. His expression, the cocky, jabbing neck movements, gave way to something else, something she hadn’t seen before. He leaned his head to one side and his eyes seemed to radiate sympathy. He held that look for a long time, before saying quietly, ‘We have to do horrible things sometimes, really horrible things. But we do them for the right reason.’

What maddened her now, as she sat in this barren piece of parkland, was that she almost agreed with him. She was not some pacifist, incense-burning mung-bean merchant who thought all power was inherently evil and that we should all be nice to each other. She understood how the world worked. Specifically, she understood-better than anyone-how critical it was to keep this tablet out of the combatants’ hands. Miller was right to do whatever it took to find it before they did. The President wanted to get re-elected and that meant he needed an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Who cared if his motives were shoddy? At least these two nations, who had been locked in a death embrace so long they could barely imagine life without the other, would finally get the accord they needed.

Maggie Costello would have signed up for all of that. She had been around the block enough times to know that peace settlements don’t come about because of an outbreak of niceness or because some priest persuades the leaders to do the right thing or even because a passionate young brunette from Dublin tells them to stop killing each other. They do it because their interests or, more often, the interests of the great powers change. Suddenly the big boys have no use for war and so it ends.

So she knew how things were. If Miller or Davis or Bonham-and it pained her to think they were probably all involved in this-had ever come clean, explained the problem and why they needed her help, she would have agreed. She would have found her own way to do it. Instead they didn’t trust her to know what the big boys knew. She was merely a tool to be deployed, a piece set down on the chessboard whose sole duty was to get fucked.

It was getting cold, or at least she was. Probably the tiredness. She would go back to the hotel, speak to no one and, once she had slept, she would go to the airport. Where would she go? She had no idea.

Once back in the cavernous lobby of the Citadel, she walked with her head down, determined to make eye contact with no one. She realized it made no sense, but she felt as if everyone knew what had happened to her these last few hours and she couldn’t bear to be seen.

‘Miss Costello! Hello!’ It was a clerk at reception, her ponytail swinging as she bounced up and down, waving a piece of paper, loudly calling across the lobby. ‘Miss Costello, please!’

If only to shut her up, Maggie marched across the polished floor, hoping no one else had caught this little scene.

‘Ah, Miss Costello. He said it was most urgent. You just missed him. He was here a minute ago, I told him-’

‘Please, you’ll have to slow down. Who said what was urgent?’

‘The man who came here. I told him he could leave a voicemail message from the house phone but he refused. He wanted me to give you this.’ She handed Maggie a piece of paper, torn from the hotel’s message pad.

Meet me in an old moment. I know what we have to do. Vladimir Junior.