Read The Last Testament Online
Authors: Sam Bourne
The Last Testament (15 page)
‘So, my friend, to what do I owe this pleasure?’
‘I thought maybe we would meet for a later night cup of coffee, perhaps a piece of cake. Talk about old times.’
Al-Naasri turned to his son, who was fussing in the back of the store. ‘I forgot that our friend from Baghdad is something of a joker with us!’ Then he turned back to Mahmoud, still smiling. ‘Would you forgive me, Mahmoud, if we got straight to business. It’s late and I am a busy man.’
‘Of course.’ Mahmoud tried flashing his own smile: he wanted to learn from this wealthy man, to copy him. He reached into the holdall, bringing out the first of the two seals that a young cousin had brought him within hours of what Mahmoud liked to think of as the museum’s grand opening. Others had reached him later, chipped and damaged. But none were as good as this one.
Al-Naasri took it from him, checking its weight in his hands, testing its solidity. He reached into the breast-pocket of his suit and pulled out a pair of half-moon reading glasses.
‘It’s real, I assure you. Mahmoud wouldn’t spend fifteen hours getting his arse pounded on that bus for a fake—’
Al-Naasri halted him with an upward glance of the eyes, peering out from above the lenses. The expression demanded quiet. The Jordanian was concentrating. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘What else?’
Mahmoud produced the second seal, larger and more ornate.
THE LAST TESTAMENT
121
He had the sequence of items all worked out, building to what he thought would be an irresistible climax.
Al-Naasri submitted the seal to the same scrutiny then placed it down on the table so he could examine Mahmoud with similar thoroughness. ‘You have done well here, my friend. I am impressed. Do I have the feeling the best is yet to come?’ He flashed the teeth once more.
‘You do, my friend, you do indeed.’ Mahmoud pulled the bag up onto his lap, and dug both hands in to bring out the clay tablet that had come to him in the café a few days earlier.
Al-Naasri extended his hands to take it from him. He held the envelope in one, and pulled out the tablet with the other.
Suddenly he called over his shoulder to his son: ‘My glass, please!’
Nawaf brought out a jeweller’s eyeglass, which al-Naasri expertly lodged in his left eye. The older man hunched over the table, studying the object closely. He let out a low murmur, but said nothing.
‘So what do you think?’ Mahmoud couldn’t help himself.
Al-Naasri leaned back, the glass still wedged in place, so that his left eye was magnified grotesquely. ‘I think you have earned the right to see the al-Naasri collection.’ He let the glass fall out, catching it in his hand.
Without prompting, Nawaf began to unlock a door behind the shop counter which opened, Mahmoud presumed, onto a storeroom. All the big dealers worked like this: trinkets sold out front, the real deal hidden behind. Hurriedly, he stashed his hoard back in the bag and got up.
They walked in single file through a back room that was filled with cardboard boxes and two giant rolls of bubble wrap. This, surely, was where the treasure was to be found. But the al-Naasri men did not linger; they did not even switch on a light. Instead, with the father in front of Mahmoud and the son behind him, they kept walking, until they reached a second door. This one 122
SAM BOURNE
was sturdier and more heavily secured; al-Naasri had to use three keys to unlock it.
To Mahmoud’s surprise it opened onto the outside, a cool breeze of night air touching his face. Down a couple of stairs, and the three men were standing in a decent-sized backyard.
‘Nawaf, do you have the spade?’
Mahmoud swung round to see the young man holding a solid metal spade. Instinctively Mahmoud’s free hand reached for his dagger and whipped it out, thrusting it in Nawaf’s direction.
‘Oh, my dear brother, don’t be so ridiculous!’ said Jaafar al-Naasri, catching Mahmoud’s hunted expression and laughing broadly. ‘Nawaf here is not going to hit you. The spade is so he can show you our collection.’
Mahmoud’s head was spinning. Sleep-deprived and confused, his eyes adjusted to see that this barren scrap of land was in fact covered with sandy brown earth, like a vegetable patch. And now, directed by his father and apparently unfazed by Mahmoud pulling a blade on him, Nawaf was standing in the middle of it, digging.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Wait and see.’
Al-Naasri and Mahmoud stood, watching Nawaf as he dug, in a smooth, easy rhythm, into the ground. Mahmoud noticed Nawaf’s arms, knotted with muscles.
Slowly, out of the ground, a shape began to emerge. Nawaf dug harder, then threw aside his spade and crouched, scratching at the soil with his bare hands. In the moonlight, Mahmoud could make out a figure, an animal of some kind. Nawaf beckoned them over.
As he got nearer, Mahmoud saw it clearly. Pulled from the ground was a statue, a ram on its hind legs, its front hooves gripping a slim tree trunk, its horns caught in the tree’s ornate flowers. As Nawaf dusted off the soil, and in the light of the THE LAST TESTAMENT
123
night sky, Mahmoud could see this extraordinary sculpture was carved from the most delicate copper, silver and gold.
Mahmoud gasped.
Al-Naasri senior smiled. ‘You recognize it, yes? Perhaps you have seen it in the newspapers.’ Mahmoud nodded, unable to speak. ‘It is the Ram in the Thicket, found in the Great Pit of Death at Ur,’ al-Naasri went on, enjoying the moment. ‘You probably saw it on a school trip to the National Museum when you were a child. I know I did. It was one of the highlights.’
‘And now you have it here?’
‘Have you not seen it with your own eyes?’
‘You are showing me this so that I will know that what I have brought is worthless. Is that right? You want to humiliate Mahmoud by this comparison.’
‘Not at all, my friend. You worry too much. I am showing you this so that you might know what glories you are to live among.’
Mahmoud smiled with relief. ‘Really? You think the pieces I have brought are worthy of being kept here, in the collection?’
He liked sounding complicit with this man, the equal of this genius of the trade.
‘Not just the pieces, Mahmoud. I also plan to keep
you
here.’
And, with barely a flick of his hand, he beckoned his son to move, precisely as they had planned. Mahmoud reached for his blade, but it was too late: the spade had already thudded against his skull, knocking him to the ground. He oozed a final breath, but Nawaf pounded him with the metal head of the tool twice more, just to be sure.
‘Our very own Great Pit of Death,’ Jaafar al-Naasri murmured, almost to himself. ‘Strip him and bury him,’ he ordered his son.
‘Right away.’
Jaafar al-Naasri picked up the holdall, checking that the seals and clay tablet were still in place, and headed back inside. He was turning the second of the three locks on the door when he 124
SAM BOURNE
heard his son laughing loudly. He turned round to see Nawaf, standing over the fresh corpse, rocking back and forth in mirth.
Al-Naasri walked back until he stood alongside his son. He could not see the joke at first, until Nawaf pointed at the dead man’s chest. There, glinting in the light of the stars, one attached to each of Mahmoud’s nipples, were two fine, golden earrings.
Mahmoud believed he had hit upon the perfect hiding place: their revelation was to be his grand finale. And so it turned out.
JERUSALEM, WEDNESDAY MORNING, 9.45PM
She met Uri at the Restobar Café. Not that he called it that. ‘Meet me at the café that used to be moment,’ he had said, in a voicemail message on her mobile phone. She didn’t understand it. Was it some kind of philosophical riddle: a café that used to be moment?
She asked the hotel concierge who seemed wholly familiar with the question, instantly instructing her to ‘head out of the hotel, up the hill, second turning—’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘That used to be the Moment Café. It was bombed a few years ago. A suicide bombing.’ He pronounced both
b
’s. ‘So they changed the name.’
‘But no one remembers the new name, so they all call it “the café that used to be Moment”.’
‘Right.’ He smiled.
Uri was already there, at a corner table, hunched over a full cup of black coffee. He hadn’t so much as sipped it. Unshaven, he looked as if he hadn’t slept for days.
Maggie took the seat opposite and waited for Uri to make eye contact. Eventually she gave up waiting.
126
SAM BOURNE
‘So when’s the funeral?’
‘I don’t know. It should have been today. But the police are holding on to my mother’s body. Autopsy. It might not be till Friday.’
‘I see.’
‘Even though they say there is nothing to investigate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean—’ He looked up, meeting her gaze for the first time.
His eyes, so black, were now ringed with red. Even like this, Maggie felt ashamed to notice, he was extraordinarily handsome: she had to force herself to look away.
‘I mean they are insisting that it is suicide.’
‘You’ve told them what you think?’
‘I said to them, over and over, that it is beyond doubt that my mother did not kill herself. But they insist that those pills belonged to her. And that there was no sign of a break-in.’
‘Right.’
‘But that means nothing. The front door has been open all week. Since my father . . .’ His voice trailed off and he stared back into his coffee.
‘But you’re certain that she didn’t do that to herself.’ She couldn’t utter the word kill, still less murder. Not to his face.
‘No doubt at all. Not my mother.’ He looked up again. ‘My father maybe. This is the kind of macho stunt he might pull.
The big heroic gesture, to get everyone’s attention—’
‘Uri—’
‘It’s his fault, you know.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘No, I do. Always we had to suffer for his crazy beliefs. When we were kids, he was always arrested or he was on the TV or he was screaming at somebody. Do you know what that’s like for a kid?’
Maggie thought of her own parents. The closest they got to THE LAST TESTAMENT
127
taking a political stand was when her father resigned from the committee of the Dun Laoghaire Bowls Club in a row with the treasurer. It was over payment for the biscuits at teatime.
‘But he had principles. That’s something to admire, isn’t it?’
He looked up again, his eyes sparking with anger. ‘Not if they are the wrong principles, no. That is not something to respect.’
‘Wrong?’
‘All this worship of land: every inch must be ours, ours, ours.
It’s a kind of sickness. Idol worship or something. And look where it led. He is dead and he has taken my mother with him.’
‘Did your father know you felt this way?’
‘We argued all the time. He always said that’s why I stayed away, in New York. Not because it might actually have been good for my career, because there I had the chance to make movies properly—’
‘You make movies?’
‘Yeah, documentaries mainly.’
‘Go on.’
‘My father didn’t believe I had gone to New York to make films.
He said I ran away because I couldn’t face losing the argument.’
‘The argument over—’
‘—over everything. Voting for left-wing parties, working in the arts. “You live like some decadent dropout from Tel Aviv!”
That’s what he would say to me. Tel Aviv. The number one insult.’
Maggie paused, looking away, then back at the man opposite her. ‘Look, Uri. I know you’re in pain. And I know there is so much to talk about. But we have to find out what the hell’s going on here.’
‘Why do you care?’
‘Because the government I work for doesn’t want the whole bloody Middle East peace process going down the pan over these killings, that’s why.’
128
SAM BOURNE
‘You know my father would be happy if what you call the
“peace process” fell to pieces. He called it the “war process”.’
‘Yes. But he wouldn’t be happy to see his wife dead and maybe his son, too, would he, no matter how much you disagreed?’
‘You think my life is in danger? And you care about that?’
‘Not really. But you should.’
‘Look, the danger to me doesn’t matter. I don’t care about it.
What I care about is finding the people who did this.’
She exhaled. ‘Good. Well you can start by telling me what you know.’
For the second time in two days she was back on the West Bank, though now her guide was a man who called it Judea and Samaria, even if the phrase seemed to come wrapped in fairly large quotation marks. Uri Guttman pointed out of the window, just as Sergeant Lee had done, though he was not indicating this or that site of Palestinian suffering, but the landmarks of the Old Testament.
‘Down that road is Hebron, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the three patriarchs, are all buried. And the matriarchs too: Sarah, who was married to Abraham; Rebecca, wife of Isaac, and Leah, second wife of Jacob.’
‘I know my Bible, Uri.’
‘You are a Christian, no? A Catholic?’ He separated each syllable:
Cath-o-lic
.
‘I was born and raised that way, that’s right.’
‘What, and you are not a Catholic now? I thought it was like being a Jew. Once you are, you are.’
‘Something like that,’ Maggie said quietly, wiping the mois-ture from her window.
‘There are many Christian sites around here too. This is the Holy Land, remember.’
‘“Never to be surrendered”.’
THE LAST TESTAMENT
129
‘Are you quoting my father?’
‘Not only him.’
The guided tour was interrupted only once, when Uri turned on the radio news. The latest word was desperately bleak.
Hizbullah had launched a rocket bombardment from Lebanon, breaking their own long-held ceasefire. Israeli civilians in the north were cowering in bomb shelters and Yaakov Yariv was under pressure to hit back, pressure from his own supporters. If he was about to make peace, they said, he had to prove he was no soft touch. Maggie had discussed this with Davis on the phone that morning: Hizbullah did nothing without the backing of Iran.