The Last Testament (22 page)

And yet, as the bag went through a second time, he saw the man charged with examining the x-ray monitor turn away to share a joke with his colleague. He stayed away from the screen for three or four seconds, just as the clay tablets, now bereft of the computer which had shielded them the first time around, lay exposed and in full view. Henry went on his way.

While Henry’s fellow passengers watched the in-flight film, Henry replayed that scene in his head over and over, thanking God, Jesus and anyone else who came to mind for his luck. But as the plane began its descent for Tel Aviv, relief at the first stage of his journey gave way to anxiety about the next.

He had no luggage to collect, so he headed straight for immigration control.

‘And why you are in Israel?’ the girl, who could have been no more than eighteen, asked him.

‘I’m visiting my nephew who’ s studying here.’

‘And where is he studying?’

‘At the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem.’ Henry had a couple of Jewish friends whom he’d called up last week: as casually as 180

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he could, he had asked after their sons, both of whom were currently on gap years, and promptly taken down and memorized all the details.

Only one more stop: Customs. As a white middle-aged man, the sorry truth was that he had always passed through customs at Heathrow like a breeze, watching the poor souls, almost always black or Asian, who were asked to empty out their suitcases, take out their clothes and squeeze every last tube of toothpaste.

Racism was a hideous thing to behold, of course, but for a traveller like Henry Blyth-Pullen, it could be rather convenient.

Except this time he was stopped, the first time it had ever happened. A bored, unshaven officer waved him over to one side and then nodded wordlessly at Henry’s suitcase, which he’d been wheeling behind him. Henry pulled it up onto the metal counter between them and unzipped it.

The guard rifled through the Y-fronts, socks, toilet bag, before coming to the stash of chocolate. He looked up at Henry, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

‘And what is this?’

‘It’s chocolate.’

‘Why you bring so much?’

‘It’s for my nephew. He misses home.’

‘Can I open it?’

‘Sure. Why don’t I help?’

Henry was certain his hands were trembling, but he kept them busy enough so that the officer wouldn’t notice. He picked a bar at random, pushed up the chocolate an inch, just as he had practised on his kitchen table, and tore off the foil to reveal a solid three squares of English milk chocolate.

‘OK.’

Without thinking, Henry broke off the chocolate and offered it to the customs official, an expression that said ‘peace offering?’

on his face. The man refused and then nodded his head towards THE LAST TESTAMENT

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the exit. Henry’s examination was over. Which was lucky, because if the guard had looked closely he would have seen the next row of the bar he had tested was strangely lacking in nuts, whether whole or half, and was instead unappetizingly solid.

Clutching the handle of his suitcase more tightly than ever, Henry left the airport and joined the queue for a taxi. When it came to his turn, he said loudly, pumped up with relief, ‘Jerusalem please. To the Old City market.’

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S I X

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, WEDNESDAY, 8.45PM

For a small country, Maggie couldn’t help thinking, Israel couldn’t half be confusing. They had been driving less than an hour and yet she felt as if she had travelled through time. If Jerusalem was a town carved in the pale stone of Biblical times, each rock, each narrow cobbled path, coated in the stale must of ancient history, Tel Aviv was noisily, brashly, chokingly modern. On the horizon were gleaming skyscrapers, their highest storeys lit like checkerboards, and by the roadside line after line of concrete apartment blocks, their roofs covered with solar panels and bulbous cylinders which, Uri explained, were hot water tanks. As they pulled off the highway and into the city streets, Maggie was transfixed by the frenzy of billboards and shoppers, burger bars and pavement cafés, traffic jams and office blocks, girls in croptops and boys whose hair peaked in a series of peroxide spikes.

Just a short drive from Jerusalem, where holiness hung like a cloud, Tel Aviv seemed a temple to throbbing, urgent profanity.

‘OK, his building is number six. Let’s park here.’ They were on Mapu Street, which, judging by the class of cars parked at the kerb, seemed to be one of Tel Aviv’s more upscale neigh-THE LAST TESTAMENT

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bourhoods. The building itself was nothing special, rendered in the same white concrete. They walked through a kind of under-pass, past the lines of metal mailboxes, and found the entrance and its intercom. Uri pressed number seventy-two.

There was no reply. Impatient, Maggie reached past Uri and pressed the button again, for much longer. Still nothing.

‘Try the phone again.’

‘It’s been on voicemail all afternoon.’

‘And you’re sure this is the right apartment?’

‘I’m sure.’

Maggie began pacing. ‘How come there’s nobody in? They can’t all be out.’

‘There is no “they”. It’s just him.’

Maggie stopped, puzzled.

‘He’s divorced. Lives alone.’

‘Bollocks. What the hell can we do now?’

‘We could break in.’

Maggie suddenly became aware of the cold. What on earth was she doing here, shivering on a Tel Aviv street corner when she should have been picking out sofa-beds in Georgetown? She should be home, with Edward, cosy on their couch, ordering takeout, watching TV or whatever it was normal people did once they stopped being twenty-five-year-old maniacs who worked all hours, hopping from one nuthouse country to the next.

Edward had managed it, making the transition from backpacking idealist to Washington suit, so why couldn’t she? God knows, she had tried. Maybe she should just call Judd Bonham and tell him she was pulling out. They weren’t using her properly anyway.

She was a mediator, for Christ’s sake, she should be in the room.

Not playing at being a bloody amateur detective. She reached into her pocket and felt her cellphone.

But she knew what Bonham would say. That there was no point in her being in the room until the two sides were ready. And the 184

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way things were going, that moment was getting more remote by the day. Pretty soon, there’d be no room to be in. Her job was to get the two sides back on track, and that meant closing down this Guttman/Nour problem, whatever it was. They couldn’t afford for her to fail. She knew, better than anyone, what happened if a peace effort came close only to fall apart. For an instant she saw it again, the flash of memory she worked so hard to keep out. She had to succeed. Otherwise, that would be her career, even her life story. It would be reduced to one single, lethal mistake.

Quietly, she turned back to Uri and said, ‘No, we can’t break in. Imagine if we got caught: I’m an official of the United States government.’

‘I could do it.’

‘Yeah, but you’re with me, aren’t you? Still trouble. Is there any other way?’

Uri shook his head and punched his fist against the door of the building, sustaining what looked like serious pain without so much as a wince.

‘All right,’ said Maggie, turning away. ‘Let’s think. What happened when you called the newspaper?’

‘It was just the night news desk – said they didn’t know the movements of their columnists. Gave me his cellphone number.’

‘Which we already had.’

The silence lasted for more than a minute, Maggie straining to think of a next move. Then, suddenly, Uri leapt to his feet and all but sprinted back to the car.

‘Uri? Uri, what is it?’

‘Just get in the car.’

As they drove, Uri explained that in the army he had dated a girl whose brother had gone to India with Baruch Kishon’s son. When he saw Maggie’s face, a scrunch of incredulity, he smiled and said only, ‘Israel’s a small country.’

A few calls later and he had a cellphone number for Eyal THE LAST TESTAMENT

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Kishon. Uri had to shout into the phone: Eyal was in a club. Uri tried explaining the situation, but it was no good. They would have to go there.

While they drove, Uri put on the radio news, giving a brief translation at the end of each story. Violence on the West Bank, some Palestinian children dead; Israeli tanks re-entering Gaza; more Hizbullah rockets in the north. Talks with the Palestinians now in the deep freeze. Maggie shook her head: this whole thing was unravelling. Then: ‘A poll in America has the president five points behind. He did badly in the TV debate, apparently.’ Last item: ‘They’re getting reports of a fire at a kibbutz in the north.

Might be arson.’

They parked on Yad Harutzim Street and walked straight into the Blondie club. The noise was immediate, a pounding rhythm that Maggie could feel in her guts. There was a steady bombardment of light, including one sharp, white beam that swept across the dance floor like a searchlight.

The place was hardly full, but already there seemed to be lithe, sweaty bodies in every corner. Maggie was struck by the range of faces. In front of her were two girls, blonde with porcelain skin, while just behind was a tall black man with an Afro and thin, sharp features. Dancing alongside were a man and woman, each with dark, corkscrew curls. Maggie thought back to the briefing pack Bonham had given her, the page about the multiple tribes of Israel: Russians, Ethiopians, the
Mizrachim
, those from Arab countries. They were all here.

Maggie caught a glimpse of herself on a mirrored wall and was sufficiently shocked by what she saw to stop and stare. All her working life, she had been the youngest in the room. At negotiations between middle-aged men, she was the novelty: not only a woman, but a young and, let’s be honest, attractive woman.

They didn’t know what to make of her. How many times had she been asked when her boss, the mediator, would be along?

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Or asked to be a love and bring three coffees over to the French delegation. Or told how nice it was to have some decoration in these dull, grey talks.

She had got used to it and, of course, used it to her advantage. It wrongfooted the negotiators, made them more candid than they intended to be. They said things to her they would not have said to a ‘real’ mediator, as if talks with her were a kind of dress rehearsal. Only once the deal was done would they fully understand that she was indeed the real thing. But her greatest asset was the competition. Without realizing it, these suits would compete for her attention. She first spotted it when she ran a back-channel session for the Sri Lankan civil war, held in a log cabin in Sweden. At mealtimes, she noticed, the participants would jostle to be seated near her. They wanted her to laugh at their jokes, to nod at their insights. They couldn’t help themselves: it was how they were conditioned to behave around an attractive woman. But for her it was inestimably useful. Every little move she pushed them to make, inch by tortured inch, was one they knew would keep them in her affections. If they held out over this word in a treaty, or that line on a map, she would be disappointed in them. And they didn’t want that.

But she didn’t look like that here. Now, surrounded by these gorgeous creatures, none older than twenty-five, with their glowing skin and skimpy tops, she realized she must be the oldest person in the place. She saw the black trousers, Ann Taylor jacket and Agnes B shirt of her own outfit: fine for work, positively elegant when meeting diplomats and ministers. But here it was dull. And those crow’s feet around her eyes, or the creases when she smiled . . .

‘He’s over there.’

Uri gestured towards a man sitting back watching the dancing, his hand around the neck of a beer bottle, nodding to the music.

He looked part-stoned, part-drunk – and fully out of it.

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Uri sat beside him and, after a brief, seated embrace, spoke into his ear. While they spoke, Maggie scoped the club. By the entrance she could see a man, newly arrived, who looked as out of place as she was. He wore rimless glasses, which declared him

‘adult’ amongst these partying children.

She could see from Eyal’s expression that Uri had reached the point in the story where he had lost both his parents. Eyal was shaking his head and pulling on Uri’s shoulder, as if initiating another hug. But Uri was already bringing out the cellphone to show Eyal that the last call Shimon Guttman had made had been to Baruch Kishon.

Eyal shrugged apologetically; he didn’t know anything. Uri kept up the questions, now turning back to Maggie with snatches of translation. When had he last spoken with his father? On Sunday morning. His father was off on ‘assignment’. Nothing unusual there. The old man was always going away; that’s why he and Eyal’s mother had broken up. Had he said anything about where he was going? Nothing Eyal could remember. Mind you, he had been off his face the night before. Eyal smiled.

‘Eyal, did your father mention a trip to Geneva?’

Careful
, thought Maggie.

‘As in, like, Switzerland? No. He usually tells me when he’s going abroad. Likes me to check on his apartment. Pretty anal that way.’

‘So you don’t think he’s abroad?’

‘Nope.’

‘But you haven’t spoken to him since Sunday? And you’re not worried?’

‘I wasn’t worried. Till you guys started freaking me out.’

They drove back fast, with Eyal, no longer blissed out, in the back. Uri kept up the questioning, extracting only one more detail: that when Eyal and his father spoke on Sunday morning, Baruch 188

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Kishon had seemed in a good mood. He said he had a ‘hot’ story to work on. Or maybe it was cool. Eyal couldn’t remember.

The eleven o’clock news came on, Uri passing on only that the kibbutz arson story was now the lead item: they had found among the wreckage some charred human remains. An IDF spokesman said there was firm evidence that this was a terror attack, mounted by Palestinians from Jenin. Speculation was already mounting over the political fallout. This raid was bound to be seen as a threat to the already fragile peace talks in Jerusalem, and a further blow to the standing of Prime Minister Yariv.