Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

Then in a louder, more deliberately normal voice, he continued: ‘Orli trained as a designer in London. I thought maybe you’d like to take a look at some of her latest clothes.’ He made a listening gesture, cupping his ear with his hand, then started pointing. The bug could be anywhere: shirt, shoes, trousers, anywhere.

Next, Uri opened up a cupboard and began to pull out men’s clothes. Were those his, still stored here, despite his insistence that the gorgeous Orli was an ex? Or did they belong to Orli’s new boyfriend?

She couldn’t stare for long because Orli was now standing Maggie before her own closet, assessing her up and down with the brutality women reserve only for each other. As it happened, while Maggie might not have Orli’s skinny arms, they weren’t too far apart: she would be able to fit most of the clothes on the rail.

Orli picked out a long, shapeless skirt-no mistake that, Maggie suspected. ‘What about those?’ Maggie said, indicating a pair of neat, grey trousers. She noticed a T-shirt and fitted cardigan that would complete the outfit just fine. Reluctantly, Orli handed them over. Pushing her luck, Maggie also nominated a pair of chic leather boots at the bottom of the cupboard. If she was going to wear another woman’s clothes, she thought, she might as well enjoy it.

Orli left the clothes in a pile on the corner of the bed, turned on her heel and strode off. Maggie could hardly blame her. If Edward had marched in one day with another woman, demanding that this stranger get undressed in Maggie’s apartment and then raid her wardrobe, she would hardly be delighted. Edward . They hadn’t spoken for two days.

Within a few minutes, they were saying goodbye, Orli drawing out her embrace with Uri a second or two longer than was strictly necessary. He and Maggie headed down the stairs wearing not only new clothes but, at his insistence, having ditched everything else that might contain a device: shoes, bag, pens, the lot.

‘You’d be amazed where they can put a microphone or even a camera these days,’ he said, as they walked towards the car. ‘Can of hairspray, baseball cap, sunglasses, heel of a shoe, lapel, anything.’

She looked at him.

‘We’ve done it all, for TV documentaries. Hidden camera investigations.’

‘Sure, Uri.’ She suspected this knowledge was acquired wearing the uniform of the IDF rather than in the edit suites of Tel Aviv TV-land.

Once in the car, he put the music back on and they drove in silence. It was Maggie who broke it.

‘So what’s the deal with Orli, then?’ She hoped it sounded matter-of-fact, as if she was barely bothered.

‘I told you. An ex-girlfriend.’

‘How ex?’

‘Ex. We stopped seeing each other more than a year ago.’

‘I thought you were in New York a year ago.’

‘I was. She was with me. What is this, an interrogation?’

‘No. But five minutes ago we were in the apartment of a woman I’d never met and suddenly you’re dressing me up in her clothes. I think I have a right to know who she is.’

‘So this is about your rights now, is it?’ Uri was taking his eye off the road to smile at her.

She knew how she sounded. She decided to shut up, to look out of the window and say nothing more. That lasted at least fifteen seconds.

‘Why did she dump you?’

‘How do you know she dumped me? I might have dumped her.’

‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She said she was sick of hanging around in New York waiting for me to commit. So she came back here.’

‘And is it over? Between you?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Maggie, what is this? Until this week I hadn’t spoken to her for nearly a year. She called me about my parents; said if there was anything I needed, I should call. We needed something; I called. Jesus!’

Maggie was about to apologize, to be gracious, to forgive Uri for having a beautiful ex-girlfriend, all of which were possible now that he had said what he had said, but the chance was taken from her. Her phone rang, displaying the number of the US consulate. She gestured at Uri to pull over, so that she could get out and speak, away from the car and the assorted microphones it might be concealing. The phone could be tapped, of course; a bug could even be hidden inside it. But what could she do? She couldn’t throw away her phone, she had to be contactable. And she couldn’t ignore a call from the consulate. Now standing on a street corner, she answered it.

‘Hi Maggie, it’s Jim Davis. I’m here with Deputy Secretary Sanchez and Bruce Miller.’ There was a click, as she was put on speakerphone.

‘Maggie, it’s Robert Sanchez here. Things have got a little worse in the course of the day-’

‘A little worse? A little worse?’ It was Miller, his Southern twang cutting right through Sanchez’s soft baritone. She imagined him pacing, while Davis and Sanchez sat. ‘Try a lot worse, Costello. This whole country’s burning up faster than a Klansman’s cross. Now we got the Israeli Arabs rioting: Galilee, Nazareth, Garden of fucking Gethsemane for all I know. And Hizbullah are still knocking seven bells of shit out of the north. Israelis are getting mighty restless.’

‘I understand.’

‘I hope you do, Miss Costello. ‘Cause I gotta tell ya, the President and a whole lotta other folks have put way too much into this peace process to see it turn into a pile of buffalo shit now.’

This, Maggie knew, was the kind of talk that made Bruce Miller such a force of nature in Washington, overwhelming anyone unlucky enough to stand in his way. Before he got his man elected to the White House, he was a staple on the talk shows, out-mouthing even the Bill O’Reillys and Chris Matthews with this trademark blend of farm-boy argot and cut-to-the-chase political insight. He was smart and funny at the same time; the TV producers couldn’t get enough of him.

‘We got three big motives in play here. First up, my job is to get the President re-elected in November. Peace treaty in Jerusalem makes that a sure thing. Not many of those in politics, so if you get one, you grab it. Second, Mid-East peace wins the President a place in history. He succeeds where all the others failed. I like that, too. I like that a lot.’

Maggie was smiling despite herself. In her field, euphemism and circumlocution were the standard speech patterns; undiplomatic candour like Miller’s made a refreshing change.

‘But here’s the point, Miss Costello. Usually doing the right thing and winning votes don’t go together. When LBJ gave black folks the vote, that was the right thing to do, but it screwed the Democratic Party in the South to this very day. It was right, but it fucked us in the ass. Now this is different, even a cynical old toad like me can see that. We got ourselves a chance to do the right thing and win a ton of votes doing it. And believe me, stopping the Jews and Arabs fighting after they’ve been killing each other so long, that’s the right thing to do. We owe it to them not to fuck it up.’ He paused, just to make sure his homily had sunk in. ‘So what you got?’

Maggie flannelled a while, claiming some progress on both sides, before falling back on her earlier insistence that their best shot at halting the violence would be discovering the specific cause she believed lay behind several, if not all, of the incidents. She was getting closer to uncovering that cause, but it would take time.

‘Time’s what we don’t have, Maggie.’

‘I know, Mr Miller,’ Maggie said, hearing the almost plaintive note of desperation in his voice. She felt a surge of guilt, that she had been entrusted with this vital task and she was fumbling it. Miller was not all hardball politics; behind that good ol’ boy exterior was a man who clearly yearned to make peace. And she, instead of helping, had so far achieved nothing. She hung up, promising another progress report later that night, and got back in the car, her earlier worry over Orli now seeming shamefully trivial.