by Sam Bourne
‘Opinion? Who said anything about opinion? Not me. I’ve been using the word information. Information, Miss Costello. Different thing. Shimon had obviously uncovered some information that would force Yariv to realize the lunacy of his ways. I think he wanted to get it out there any way he could.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘Now you’re asking too much of me, Miss Costello.’
‘Does that mean you won’t tell us or you don’t know?’ It was Uri, operating as if he and Maggie were a tag team. Akiva ignored him, his eye remaining fixed on Maggie.
‘Why don’t you take some advice from someone who’s been around this neighbourhood a little longer than forty-eight hours? What I know, you don’t want to know. And, Uri, you don’t want to know either. Believe me, big things are at stake here. The fate of God’s chosen people in God’s Promised Land. A covenant between us and the Almighty. That’s too big for a few jumped-up, sleazeball politicians to try to tear up, no matter how important they think they are, whether here or in Washington. You can tell that to your employers, Miss Costello. No one comes between us and the Almighty. No one.’
‘Or else?’
‘Or else? You’re asking “or else”? This is not a question to ask. But look around you. Uri, take my advice. Leave this alone. You have parents to mourn for. You have a funeral to arrange.’
There was a knock on the door. The secretary poked her head around, and mouthed something to Shapira. ‘Sure, I’ll call him back.’
He turned back to Uri. ‘Do yourself a favour, Uri. Mourn your mother. Sit shiva. And leave this thing alone. No good can come of poking around. Your father’s task has been fulfilled. Not the way he intended, maybe. But fulfilled. The people of Israel have been roused.’
Uri was doing his best, Maggie could see, to disguise his eye-rolling contempt for what he was hearing. Occasionally he slumped into his seat, like an insolent schoolboy, only to remember himself and sit up straight. Now he leaned forward to speak. ‘Do you know anything about Ahmed Nour?’
Maggie leapt in. ‘Mr Shapira, you’ve been very generous with your time. Can I thank you-’
‘What, you’re trying to blame me for the death of that Arab? Is that what they’re saying on the leftist radio already? I’m surprised at you, Uri, for sucking up that bullshit.’
Maggie was on her feet now. ‘It’s been a very troubling time, you can imagine. People are saying all kinds of things.’ She knew she was babbling, but her eyes were doing the work, desperately trying to say to Akiva Shapira: He’s just lost both his parents. He’s gone a little nuts. Ignore him.
Shapira was now standing up, not to bid farewell to Maggie but to embrace Uri.
‘You can be very proud of your parents, Uri. But now let them rest in peace. Leave this alone.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A MMAN , J ORDAN , TEN MONTHS EARLIER
Jaafar al-Naasri was not a man to rush. ‘Those that hurry are those that get caught,’ he used to say. He had tried explaining that to his son, but he was too dumb to listen. Al-Naasri wondered if he had been cursed to be surrounded by such stupidity, even in his own house. He had made sure to marry a clever woman. They had done everything right, sending their children to one of the best schools in Amman. Yet his daughter was a slut who modelled herself on the whores on MTV; and his boys were no better. One a lumpen oaf, whose only value lay in his fists. The other brighter, but a layabout. Up at noon, with aspirations to be a playboy.
It pained Jaafar al-Naasri. Yes, he was a wealthy man now, thanks in part to the generosity of Saddam Hussein and the United States military. Between them, they had opened the door to the great treasure house of mankind, the repository of the very origins of human history. Was it an exaggeration? Jaafar was prone to the occasional lapse into hype, he could not deny it: what salesman was not? But the Baghdad Museum needed no selling. It had served as the keeper of man’s earliest memories. Mesopotamia had been the first civilization and those beginnings were all there, under glass, tagged, indexed and preserved in the National Museum of Antiquities. The first examples of writing, anywhere in the world, were to be found in Baghdad, in the thousands of tablets written in cuneiform, the language of four millennia past. Art, sculpture, jewellery and statuary from the days when these were all new forms, relics of the age of the Bible and before, they were to be found in Baghdad.
For decades they had stayed in alarmed cases and behind steel doors, protected by the greatest security system in the world: the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But thanks to those GIs in their tanks and the bomber pilots in the skies above, Saddam had fled and the doors to the museum had been flung wide open. The American soldiers who had surrounded the Ministry of Oil, placing its files and papers, its precious secrets of black gold, under round-the-clock armed guard, thankfully did nothing to protect the Museum. A single tank came, days too late. Otherwise, it was left naked and exposed, as open and available as a Baghdad whore. And Jaafar and his boys had been able to feast on her again and again, without disturbance.
Make no mistake, he had done well, filling the al-Naasri collection in his backyard with enough delights to start a museum of his own. His fool of a son had been digging morning, noon and night for months, stashing away the booty his wide network of runners brought daily from Iraq. Sometimes, if Jaafar suspected they were two-timing him, supplying a rival dealer, here in Amman or further afield, in Beirut or Damascus, then Nawaf would have to use his spade for another purpose. He had only had to do that half a dozen times, maybe less. Jaafar was not counting. But he could not say he was happy. By now, after a blessing like the US invasion, he should have been at the very top of his game, like that bastard Kaslik, who had built an empire across the region thanks to the 2003 war. But Kaslik had sons he could rely on. Jaafar al-Naasri could rely only on himself.
Which is why he was stuck here, now, in his workshop doing a job he should have been able to delegate. He could not entrust such a task to staff: the risk of betrayal, either stealing the goods or tipping somebody off, was too great. But he had once imagined a team of junior al-Naasris, as skilled as he was, beavering away, only too eager to take on the most sensitive work.
And this was certainly sensitive. The downside of Saddam’s fall was that after it, the rules suddenly tightened. Governments around the world who had turned a blind eye to the trade in stolen Iraqi treasures before 2003 were no longer so forgiving. Maybe they felt it was OK to steal from a dictator, but not quite right to steal the inheritance of ‘the Iraqi people’. Personally, Jaafar blamed the television news. If it hadn’t been for the pictures of the Baghdad looting, things could have gone on as before. But after they had seen it, the denuding of the grand museum by wheelbarrow and sack, the high-ups in London and New York had got anxious. They couldn’t be accomplices to this great cultural crime. So the word went out to customs officials and auction houses and museum curators from Paris to Los Angeles: nothing from Iraq.
Which meant Jaafar had to be creative. More than ever, he would have to conceal the products he was sending out. The item on the bench in front of him was a source of particular pride. It was a flat plastic box, divided into two dozen compartments, full of brightly coloured beads, under a clear lid-a jewellery-making set, aimed at the younger end of the teenage girl market. His wife’s sister had bought it for Naima’s twelfth birthday after a trip to New York. His daughter had played with it for a while, then tired of it. Jaafar had come across it a couple of months ago, quite by accident, and had realized its potential immediately.
Now, trying to ape the garish tastes of an adolescent girl, he reached for a pink bead, threading it onto the string, which already carried a fake ruby, a purple sequin and the metal top from a bottle of Coca-Cola. He smiled. It looked like a tacky charm bracelet, a medley of novelty items that a teenager might wear, break and never remember again.
Unless they looked too closely at one of the items on the string. It was not the only golden piece-there was also a brassy miniatu
re poodle-but it was the finest. A simple gold leaf, delicate and finely engraved. But you would have to look, and Jaafar had been around precious things long enough to know that context was everything. Had it been in a museum, resting on a cushion, far away from the beads and the bottle-tops, then maybe you might have guessed that this was an earring buried four and a half thousand years ago with a princess of Sumeria. On Jaafar’s worktable, cheek-by-jowl with trash, it looked like nothing.
Next came the seals, small stone cylinders embossed with a unique cuneiform pattern. Five millennia ago these would have been rolled onto clay tablets to denote a signature. Ingenious for their time, but no more ingenious than the home Jaafar had found for them. He reached down to the big brown carton that had arrived a week ago from Neuchatel, Switzerland. Inside was a bulk load of toy wooden chalets, complete with painted windows and surrounded by matchstick picket fences. Lift the roof and you would discover that this mantelpiece ornament had another function. A slow, tinny melody would begin, picked out by the shiny metal mechanism within.
It had taken him months to source this exact music box. He had looked on dozens of websites and spoken to more technicians than he could count until he was satisfied that this one had the right specifications. Now, as he prized out the mechanism with his screwdriver, he saw his patience had been rewarded. The central rotating drum, punctuated with tiny spears which caught a hammer to produce the melody, was hollow, just as he had been assured. His hand, gloved in latex, reached for the first of the cylinder-seals which he had lined up on a shelf at eye level. Slowly, carefully, he eased the seal inside the metal drum. It fitted perfectly. He exhaled his relief, looking again at the hoard of seals he had amassed, lined up before him like soldiers awaiting inspection. They were all sorts of shapes and sizes, but now he felt confident, glancing down at the carton from the Swiss company, who had sent him the full range of music boxes, from very small to ‘our grand model, sir’. This might just work.
But he could do it so much quicker if he had some decent help. He glanced over at the tea chest by the big roll of bubble wrap. That alone represented about three months of hard, solitary labour. Inside it were the several hundred clay tablets he had accumulated since April 2003. He had a plan for those, too. Not fiddly, but time-consuming.
He checked the calendar, with its soft-focused portraits of the king and his gorgeous American-styled wife on each page. All being well, he would have this lot boxed up, labelled as handicrafts and on its way to London by the spring. There was no need to rush. In the business of antiquities time was never your enemy, only your friend. The longer you waited, the richer you became. And the world had waited four and a half thousand years for these beauties.
CHAPTER TWENTY
J ERUSALEM , W EDNESDAY , 1.23 PM
The drive back from Psagot had been tense. Maggie had administered a bollocking to Uri before the engine had even started. ‘Mentioning Ahmed Nour, what on earth was that for?’
‘I thought he might have something to tell us.’
‘Yeah, like “piss off before I kill both of you, too”.’
‘You think Akiva Shapira killed my parents? Are you out of your mind?’
Maggie backed off. She had to remind herself that Uri was still in the immediate shock of a double bereavement. But she was fed up with treading on eggshells. Calm self-possession and control might be the order of the day in the divorce mediation room, but not here.
‘Tell me. Why is that so crazy?’
‘You saw the guy. He’s a fanatic. Just like my dad. They loved each other, these guys.’
‘OK, so not him. Then, who?’
‘Who what?’
‘Who killed your parents? Go on. Who do you suspect?’
Uri took his eye off the road and looked at Maggie, as if in disbelief. ‘You know, I’m not used to working like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘With another person. When I make a movie, I do everything myself. Interviewing, shooting, cutting. I’m not used to having some Irish girl next to me, chipping in.’
‘I’m not “some Irish girl”, thank you very much. That kind of sexist crap may play in Israel, but not with me. OK?’
Uri shot a glance back at Maggie. ‘OK, OK.’
‘As it happens, I’m not used to it either. When I’m in the room, I’m on my own. Just me and the two sides.’
‘How come?’
‘I find it just works better that way. No aides, advisers-’
‘No, I mean how come you do this? How come you’re so good at it?’ She guessed he was trying to make amends for ‘some Irish girl’.
‘At mediation, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
She was about to tell the truth, to explain that it had been a while since she had engaged in an international negotiation, that the last dispute she had brokered had been over weekend access to Nat, Joey and Ruby George of Chevy Chase, Maryland. But she said none of that.
‘I got it from home, I suppose.’
‘Don’t tell me. Your mum and dad used to fight all the time and you became the peacemaker?’
‘No, don’t be soft.’ Though she had to admit she was impressed: as it happened, the broken home appeared in the personal histories of dozens of mediators. ‘The opposite. My parents were rock solid. Best marriage on the street. Not that that was saying much. Everyone else was rowing and fighting, husbands getting in drunk, mothers having it off with the milkman, all sorts. They used to come to my mother for advice.’
‘And you watched her?’
‘I never planned to. But couples would appear in our front room, asking my mother to arbitrate between them. “Let’s see what Mrs Costello has to say.” It became a catchphrase round our way. I watched what she did and I suppose I picked it up.’
‘She must be very proud of you.’
‘They both are.’
Uri said nothing, allowing the hum of the car to fill the void. Maggie scolded herself: it was crass to have referred to her two parents in the present tense so breezily, rubbing their aliveness in his face. But she had got carried away. It was rare for her to be asked about herself like that and she had enjoyed the chance to answer. It had probably seemed obvious to Uri, who earned his living getting people to talk about themselves, but she couldn’t remember the last time anyone else had asked, ‘How come you’re a mediator?’ It struck her that Edward had never once asked that question.
While they sped towards Jerusalem, past roads she knew were choked with Palestinians moving at a fraction of their speed, if they were moving at all, she tried to focus on the meeting with Shapira. He seemed pretty clear: Guttman had told Shapira what he had found-You don’t want to know what I know-and, Shapira believed, the Israeli government had killed him for it. But Shapira was a big, puffed-up blowhard. Why hadn’t he told Uri what his father had discovered? Maybe because she was in the room. Though that made no sense: if there was some devastating new ammunition against the peace process, he’d have seized his chance to hurl it at the Americans. Was it possible Shapira knew nothing, but simply wanted to make the Guttmans look like martyrs to the cause?
She was too lost in thought, and Uri the same, to look closely in the rear-view mirror and notice what was behind them: a white Subaru that kept three cars back. And never let them out of its sight.
They were back in the home of Shimon and Rachel Guttman. The instant Uri let them in, she shuddered. The house was not cold, but a chill hung in the air all the same. This was a place of death, twice over. She admired Uri for being able to set foot inside it.
The doormat was piled high with notes and cards: well-wishers from abroad, no doubt. Everyone else would be at Uri’s sister’s house now, where the shiva for his father would continue and where the shiva for his mother would begin once she had been buried. Maggie worried that Uri was absenting himself from a process he needed. She knew from wakes back at home that all this fuss wasn’t for the dead, but for the living, to give them something to do, to distract the
m from their grief. When you have to talk to two dozen relatives in an hour, you haven’t got time to be depressed. Yet here Uri was with her, denying himself that sedative for the pain.
‘In here.’ He switched on the light in a room that was, thankfully, at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen where she had discovered Rachel Guttman’s dead body the previous night. It was small, cramped and lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were also piles and piles of paper on every available surface. In the middle of a simple desk, just a plain table really, was a computer, a telephone and a fax machine with a jumble of electronic gadgetry, including a video camera, pushed to one side. Maggie checked the camera straight away: no tape inside.
‘Where on earth do we start?’
Uri looked at her. ‘Well, why don’t you quickly learn Hebrew? Then it will only take us a few months.’
Maggie smiled. It was the closest thing to laughter they had shared since they had met.
‘Maybe if you look at the computer. A lot of that was in English. I’ll start on these piles.’
Maggie settled herself into the seat and pressed the power button. ‘Hey, Uri. Can you give me the cellphone again?’
He pulled out the transparent plastic bag he had collected from the hospital on their way back from Psagot. Inside it were ‘the personal effects of the deceased’, the things his father had with him when he was killed. He passed her the phone. She switched it on, then selected the message inbox. Empty. Then the ‘sent’ box. Empty.
‘And you’re definitely sure your father used to send text messages?’