The Last Testament

by Sam Bourne

  Still she did not move. Her survival instinct compelled her to stay here, on this ledge invisible from the road. She feared a trick: what if she climbed back up only to be ambushed by the men who had shot Uri? Maybe she had imagined the sound of a car departing; she was so tired, her head felt light. So she just stood where she was, her face soaking from the tears that were now streaming down it.

  Eventually, she took one step forward, wincing against any sound she might make. Then another, then another, until she had a view, albeit restricted, of the road above. She could see nothing.

  She took another few paces until she was at the edge of the ledge. Below her was the craggy, beige rock of the hillside. If anyone was on the road, they would surely be able to see her here. But she could see nothing-until a white car sped by. She ducked and it went on.

  Silence. After a while she bobbed up and looked around. There was nothing on the road, nothing at the lookout spot. No cars, not even the Mercedes they had been driving. Above all, there was no Uri.

  Maggie didn’t know what to feel. She exhaled her relief that there was no corpse. Was it possible that Uri had somehow escaped, that the sound she had heard had been Uri, driving himself to safety?

  But that, she knew, made no sense. He would have come back to get her. She knew what was more likely, her mind supplying the image: masked men picking up Uri’s lifeless body, one taking the arms, the other the ankles, and swinging it into the boot of the Merc, then driving the car away.

  She walked up onto the lookout spot and examined the ground. She could see tyre marks, but it was no good. She was no detective; she didn’t know what she was looking at.

  Maggie turned her back to the road, only now noticing the beauty of this view. The sky was a pale morning blue, the sun strong enough to light up this brittle, sandy landscape: the hills, stepped in terraces, punctuated by isolated olive trees. Hardy, unfussy, somehow stubborn, these trees seemed to Maggie like short, tanned men: tough and impatient.

  Something in that view hardened her resolve. She would find that goddamned tablet if it was the last thing she did. She would do it for Uri’s sake, and for the sake of his father and mother too. Whoever had done this to him, and to his parents, would not be allowed to get away with it. She would thwart them; she would find what they did not want her to find and she would expose them while she was at it. Yes, this peace process needed saving and yes, she was desperate to clear her name. But, at this moment, both of those feelings receded. She would do this for Uri.

  And then she heard it, faint at first. She was struck, as she had been the first time, by the beauty of the melody, a haunting series of notes. And now it was a little louder, she could hear that it was not a recording or a car radio, but human voices singing, their sound carried on the breeze. She walked down to the edge of the ledge and saw that there was still no sheer drop, but rather a downward slope. She would have to make an initial jump of a few feet, and then she would just have to negotiate the hillside.

  She did it, thanking Orli for the boots she was now wearing instead of the shoes she had left at the ex-girlfriend’s apartment. Still, though, she was not equipped for this. As she pushed towards the sound of the voices, her right foot slipped from under her, so that she landed on an ankle. A few paces later, she scratched her arm on a thistle, as she unthinkingly grabbed at the air to steady herself.

  But soon she had threaded her way down from the road and had flat ground in view. And she could see the source of the song, though now it had given way to a much coarser chorus, a kind of football chant, to be sung by a crowd swaying in unison.

  Hinei ma’tov u’ma’naim, shevet achim gam yachad…

  It was the Arms Around Jerusalem protest, still going strong. Maggie had never been so glad to see a political demonstration in her life, never more grateful for the protesters’ stamina in maintaining it around the clock, just as they had promised. Even now, not much after dawn, there was a group of activists, holding hands at the foot of this hill. Why they had decided this particular spot constituted the proper boundary of Jerusalem, she had no idea. But she was relieved they had.

  ‘Are you journalist?’ It was a woman wearing a vast pair of glasses, her arms extended to a teenage girl, perhaps her daughter, on one side and a rabbinic-looking man, Maggie’s age, the fringes of his prayer shawl dangling, on the other.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Maggie, immediately and without forethought, exaggerating her Irish accent. ‘I’m a visitor.’

  ‘What, tourist?’ Turrrist.

  ‘Not quite, dear. I’m more of a pilgrim.’ It was blatant, an impersonation of the nuns at school. But Maggie prayed it would work.

  ‘Ah, you want Bethlehem?’ The woman looked incredulous. ‘You walking to Bethlehem?’

  ‘Oh, no dear, perish the thought!’

  Now the rabbi had stopped singing and was joining in the conversation. ‘You need to get to Bethlehem?’ He positioned himself to give directions.

  ‘No, actually, I’m on my way to Jerusalem. And it seems I’ve been tricked, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Tricked?’

  ‘By a taxi. Said he would take me there. He dropped me on the roadside there-’ she pointed up the hill she had just descended, ‘-he said I should enjoy the view. Then, would you credit it, he only offs and leaves. With my coat and everything.’

  ‘He was Jewish, this driver?’

  Maggie was stumped. What was the right answer? Would it be an insult to accuse a Jew of this act of perfidy? Or would it be seen as a greater treachery to have hired a Palestinian driver in the first place?

  ‘You know, I never asked him. But I do feel as if I’ve been terribly naive. I thought, this being the Holy Land and all-’

  ‘Listen, lady.’ It was the rabbi, now broken out of his place in the circle. ‘Where do you need to get to?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to trouble a man of God like yourself.’

  ‘No trouble, really. We have a driver.’ And before she had had a chance to say another word, he had produced a walkie-talkie. ‘Avram? Bo rega.’ He looked at Maggie, briefly closing his eyes in a nod, as if to say, don’t worry, it’s all under control.

  Within a few moments a car had arrived, a rugged, muddied SUV. Maggie sized it up and concluded that these rebels were supremely well organized. She didn’t doubt that they had a fleet of such vehicles on hand, patrolling the battle lines not only of the Arms Around Jerusalem demo, but of the entire anti-Yariv campaign. If what she had read was right, much of the money would have been funnelled from Christian evangelicals in the States. Once again, she was reminded that, even if they were to calm things down and bring the parties back to the table, the peacemakers would face the most enormous obstacles.

  Maggie thanked the rabbi and got in the car. A dark, burly man in shorts, with tanned, meaty forearms, was in the driver’s seat. He raised his eyebrows in a question.

  ‘Could you take me to the Old City please?’

  Within a few minutes they were back on the main road, retracing the dawn journey she had made with Uri, winding steadily upward back to the centre of Jerusalem. She felt her ears pop.

  Now the traffic was thicker, but hardly a regular urban rush hour. ‘Shabbat, shabbat,’ the driver said, gesturing to the view outside the windscreen. The city was emptying out for the sabbath, which would come with the darkness that evening.

  And soon she could see it, as the car ascended Hativat Yerushalayim Street, the long, solid wall that marked the western boundary of the Old City. She was hardly looking, staring into space, thinking only of what might have happened to Uri. Had he really taken a bullet just so that she could break free? The heaviness on her chest, the sense of dread, almost broke her. Another mistake; another betrayal. Angrily, she forced herself to channel her emotions into an unbending determination: she would find the people who had shot Uri and she would do it by finding the tablet. She sensed she was getting close. The last testament of Abraham could not be very far away.

  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?