second intifada they fought here for weeks. Took the IDF ages to finally clear the Pals out.’ He turned to smile at Maggie. ‘I hear the room rate's real low now.’
Just a few minutes after they had been driving through Israeli suburbia, they were in a different country. The buildings were still made of the pale stone she had seen in Jerusalem, but here they were dustier, forlorn. The signs were in Arabic and English: Al-Rami Motors, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Bank. She saw a clutch of wicker rattan chairs on a street corner, young men loafing on them, thin cigarettes between their lips. The furniture was for sale. Walking in the road, sidestepping the potholes, were children on their way from school, labouring under oversized rucksacks. She looked away.
On every wall and pasted on the windows of abandoned stores were posters showing the faces of boys and men, the images framed by the green, white, red and black of the Palestinian national flag.
‘Martyrs,’ said Lee.
‘Suicide bombers?’
‘Yeah, but not only. Also kids who were shooting at settlers or maybe trying to launch a rocket.’
The car dipped suddenly, caught by a deep pothole. Maggie kept staring out of the window. Here, as in almost every other place she had worked, the two sides had ended up killing each other's children. It seemed everyone doing the killing or being killed was young. She always knew that, but in the last few years she couldn't see anything else. Time after time, in place after place, she had seen it and it just sickened her. An image, the same as always, floated into her head and she had to close her eyes tight to push it away.
They threaded through crammed roads, passing a coffee shop filled with women in black head-scarves. Lee dodged a couple of wagons, pulled by young boys, loaded with fruit: pears, apples, strawberries and kiwis. Everyone used the road: people, cars, animals. It was slow and noisy, horns blaring and beeping without interruption.
‘Here we are.’
They had parked by a building that looked different from the others: it was substantial, the stone clean, the glass in the windows solid. She saw a sign, thanking the government of Japan and the European Union. A ministry.
Inside, they were ushered into a wide spacious office with a long L-shaped couch. The room was too big for the furniture inside it. Maggie suspected that grandiosity had dictated the size, with practicality and need coming a remote second.
A thickset man came in carrying a plastic tray bearing two glasses of steaming mint tea, for her and her Marine escort. Maggie had seen a half dozen more men like him on her way up, sitting around like drivers at a taxi dispatch office, smoking, sipping coffee and tea. She guessed they were officially ‘security’. In reality, they were that group she had seen in countless corners of the world: hangers-on, blessed with a brother-in-law or cousin who had found them a place on the state payroll.
‘Mr al-Shafi is ready. Please, please come.’ Maggie collected her small, black leather case and followed the guide out of the room and into another, smaller one. Furnished more sparely, it looked as if proper work was done here. On one couch and in several chairs, assorted aides and officials. On the wall, a portrait of Yasser Arafat and a calendar showing a map of the whole of Palestine, including not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel itself. An ideological statement that said hardline.
Khalil al-Shafi rose from his seat to shake Maggie's hand. ‘Ms Costello, I hear you have broken your retirement to come here and stop us children squabbling.’
The joke, and the inside knowledge it betrayed, did not surprise her. The briefing note from Davis had told her to expect a smart operator. After more than a decade in an Israeli jail, convicted not only on the usual terrorism charges but also on several counts of murder, he had become a symbol of ‘the struggle’. He had learned Hebrew from his jailers and then English, and had taken to issuing, via his wife, monthly statements – sometimes calls to arms, sometimes sober analyses, sometimes subtle diplomatic manoeuvres. When the Israelis had released him three months earlier, it had been the most serious sign yet that progress was possible.
Now al-Shafi was recognized as the de facto leader of at least one half of the Palestinian nation, those who did not back Hamas but identified with the secular nationalists of Arafat's Fatah movement. He held no official title – there was still a chairman and a president – but nothing on the Fatah side could move without him.
Maggie tried to read him. The photos, of a stubbled face with broad, crude features, had led her to expect a streetfighter rather than a sophisticate. Yet the man before her had a refinement that surprised her.
‘I was told it was worth it. That you and the Israelis were close to a deal.’
‘“Were” is the right word.’
‘Not now?’
‘Not if the Israelis keep killing us in order to play games with us.’
‘Killing you?’
‘Ahmed Nour could not have been killed by a Palestinian.’
‘You sound very certain. From what I hear, Palestinians seem to have killed quite a lot of other Palestinians over the years.’
His eyes flashed a cold stare. Maggie smiled back. She was used to this. In fact, she did it deliberately: show some steel early, that way they'll resist the temptation to dismiss you as some lightweight woman.
‘No Palestinian would kill a national hero like Ahmed Nour. His work was a source of pride to all of us and a direct challenge to the hegemony and domination of the Israelis.’ Maggie remembered: al-Shafi had taken a doctorate in political science while in jail.
‘But who knows what else he was doing?’
‘Believe me, he was the last person on this earth who would collaborate with the Israelis.’
‘Oh come on. We know he wasn't a big fan of the new government. He couldn't stand Hamas.’
‘You're informed well, Ms Costello. But Ahmed Nour understood we have a government of national unity in Palestine now. When Fatah went into coalition with Hamas, Ahmed accepted it.’
‘What else could he say publicly? Last time I checked, collaborators weren't wearing T-shirts with “collaborator” written on the chest.’
Al-Shafi leaned forward and looked unblinking at Maggie. ‘Listen to me, Miss Costello. I know my people and I know who is a traitor and who is not. Collaborators are young or they are poor or they are desperate. Or they have some shameful secret. Or the Israelis have something they need. None of these fit Ahmed Nour. Besides—’
‘He knew nothing.’ Suddenly Maggie realized the obvious. ‘He was a middle-aged scholar. He didn't have any information to give.’
‘Yes, that's right.’ Al-Shafi looked puzzled; he was looking for the trap. The American had folded too early. ‘Which is why it must have been the Israelis who killed him.’
‘Which would explain the strange accent of the killers.’
‘Exactly. So you agree with me?’
‘What would be their motive?’
‘The same as always, for the last one hundred years! The Zionists say they want peace, but they don't. Peace scares them. Whenever they are close, they find a reason
