Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

‘If you can trust me enough to tell me your name, I’ll tell you what I know.’

‘My name is Uri.’

‘OK, Uri. My name is Maggie. Maggie Costello. Let’s sit down and talk.’

Calmly, Maggie filled a glass with water from the tap and handed it over. Then she led him back out of the kitchen and sat him down, her body reeling from the adrenaline.

‘You think what happened tonight has something to do with this information, of your father’s.’

Uri Guttman nodded.

‘Do you think your father was killed deliberately, because of that information?’

‘I don’t know. Some people say so. I don’t know. But I tell you what: I will find out who did this to my family. I will find them and I will make them pay.’

She wanted to tell him that his mother’s death was almost certainly the result of horrible, intense grief. His father had been killed accidentally and now his mother had taken her own life, as simple as that. But she couldn’t say that because she wasn’t sure she believed it.

Instead, she told him what she had just discovered. That Ahmed Nour, the Palestinian archaeologist slain earlier that day, had secretly worked with his father.

At first, he refused to accept it. He sat back in his chair with the pretence of a smile, cruel and bitter. No way, he said more than once. An anagram? It was absurd. But once Maggie had explained that his father and Nour had both trained as specialists in biblical archaeology, and once she had mentioned the unusual but recurring ceramic pattern, he fell quiet. It was clear that Maggie could have come up with no more shocking fact about Shimon Guttman. A lifelong mistress, a teenage lover, a secret family-she guessed Uri could have accepted any one of those revelations more readily than that his father might have had a working partnership with a Palestinian.

‘Look, if I’m right, it means that there may indeed be something going on here. Whatever secret it was your father was carrying, it seems to bring great harm to those who know it.’

‘But my mother knew nothing.’

‘Like you said, maybe whoever did this didn’t know that-or didn’t want to risk it.’

‘You think the same people who killed this Palestinian killed my mother?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because if they did, then I know who will be the next to die.’

‘Who?’

‘Me.’

APRIL 2003, BAGHDAD

Mahmoud was regretting this decision. He should be above this now, he said to himself; as he was thrown into the air yet again, his bottom landing on the hard plastic seat of the bus as it hit the thousandth bump in the road. He should be the Mr Big who hired runners, yet here he was, working as a humble courier himself. Ten hours down, five more to go on the clapped-out old charabanc they laughingly referred to as the Desert Rocket.

For the last couple of weeks he had been working on a different business model. He would sit in the café on Mutannabi Street, waiting for pieces to come his way-and, let Allah be praised, they kept coming-and then pass them on via one of the countless boys who had emerged, like rats from a sewer, the instant Saddam was toppled. Mahmoud marvelled at the sudden proliferation of these teenage entrepreneurs. No one had planned for it; no one had ever discussed it. There had been no training; not even a rumour that there would be money to be made the day you-know-who was gone. Yet here they all came, slipping out of every backstreet and flea-ridden alley.

The trade was brisk, with mobile phones the preferred means of communication. Mahmoud would call, say, Tariq, who he knew had a shipment going to Jordan that night, telling him that he had a couple of items that needed transportation. He would hand those to one of the boys, who would run them across town. Then Tariq would pass them onto another runner, who would take the Desert Rocket to Amman. There he would meet al-Naasri or one of his rivals among the big Jordanian dealers. Al-Naasri would work out a price, and the courier would take the cash back to Iraq. Thanks to the phone network, the runners knew better than to slice off a cut. If they did, there were no shortages of ditches along the Tigris for them to fall into.

Mahmoud had been doing that profitably for a while. Business had been constant since the statue came down, but he had been close to the trade for longer than that. It was not spoken of in whispers; it was not spoken of at all, but there had been some-how should he put it?- movement of antiquities since the first war, the mother of all battles, back in 1991. Until then, looting had been unheard of, but the American bombardment loosened things up a little: even Saddam couldn’t keep an eye on everything when there were Cruise missiles falling from the sky. Not that he did not come down hard on the guilty men. Mahmoud, like every other ‘dealer’ in Iraq, remembered the fate of the eleven men found guilty of sawing the face off a magnificent Mesopotamian winged bull: the beast itself was too heavy to transport anywhere. Saddam made sure it was known that he signed the death warrant for that crime himself. And, with characteristic flair, it was Saddam who decreed that these thieves should suffer the same fate they had inflicted on the mighty bronze creature. Their executioner duly took an electric saw and sliced the faces off each one of them in turn. And each, waiting for his own death, had had to watch as it came to his fellows. When the eleventh man was killed, he had already witnessed the punishment that awaited him ten times over.

Despite that deterrent, some grand pieces did get out. Mahmoud never saw, but he had heard about, the section of a relief taken from the ancient Palace of Nimrod. Rather poignantly, Mahmoud thought, it depicted slaves in chains. He imagined that image, smuggled out to the West by the suffocated people of Iraq: it was like a distress signal.

The route then as now was Jordan and the conduit, then as now, was the al-Naasri family. The traffic in treasures along that path had never been heavier than it was now; trinkets and pots from every age of man, from the eras of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Persians and the Greeks. Mostly it was fragments that were taken, though the tale was told of Tariq’s boys who lugged an entire statue to Amman, stashing it in the boot of the Desert Rocket. Apparently they slipped the driver a dollar or two-and told him their cargo was only a corpse. Such was the topsy-turvy morality of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

Mahmoud had sent nearly a dozen runners to Amman in the last fortnight, each of them following the route he had taken himself when he was starting out. But something told him he was due a visit in person. He needed to see al-Naasri eyeball-to-eyeball. With business expanding at the rate it was, and the sums at stake, there were bound to be opportunities to bend the rules. Mahmoud wasn’t going to be a sucker. He wanted to be sure al-Naasri was playing it straight.

So he had filled a holdall with his latest hoard of three or four items, including a couple of ancient seals, that clay tablet he had got from the nervous man in the café and the pièce de résistance , a pair of gold-leaf earrings which, though it was anyone’s guess, his valuer had estimated to be four and a half thousand years old. He wasn’t about to entrust those to some spotty fourteen-year-old from Saddam City. All the more reason why he was spending fifteen hours in the company of the sputtering bone-trembler that was the Desert Rocket.

He had dozed off in the final hours of the journey, waking up with a start when the bus juddered to a halt. He had kept the bag on his lap throughout, the handles entwined around his wrists lest the thieving scum around him get any ideas. Even before he had opened his eyes, he had patted the bag, to make sure he could still feel the shapes within; he tested its weight. As for the earrings, he knew they were somewhere completely safe.