Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

‘Yes, because what the United States of America needs to realize-’

Big mistake, thought Maggie. Should not have formulated it as a question, inviting a bloody answer.

‘Thank you, that’s clear. They did this to silence the Guttmans, because they feared whatever information it was they had discovered.’ The inflection was downward now, indicating a statement. ‘Yet what you have described are the views Shimon Guttman held for many years. He most certainly would have wanted to convey them to the Prime Minister. But they were hardly new. How do you explain the frantic urgency? How do you explain why the Israeli authorities would act this way to suppress an opinion that was already well known?’

‘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.’

AMMAN , JORDAN ,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.