Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

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 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 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.

‘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 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.’