I realise now that that’s the truth of it. The men from the ministry were offering me an escape, an exit from a life that wasn’t just wearing me down, it was killing me. I do wonder whether I’d have gone even if I’d known how it was going to turn out. The awful truth is that I suspect I might. No, I know I would have gone anyway. It was no longer about what I wanted to do. Something bigger and stronger than me had taken over. All I had to do was obey. I was no longer in control.
Part 2
11
I was wearing the half-smile of the incredulous, palms upwards on my knees, jaw slightly dropped. Toby was weaving in his hatchback through the Jerusalem traffic like a native. He was shaking his head.
“I tell you he came on to me, Toby.”
“I just don’t believe it.”
“Is that you don’t believe me as in you think I’m making it up, or as in you’re amazed and can barely warrant it?”
Toby carried on shaking his head and hooted at a cyclist.
I’d come strangely to like the boy Toby. We’d flown out via Switzerland, where we’d had an overnighter to collect a briefing from some UN worker bees – they don’t like to be called drones – about the projected $10 billion aid budget for the occupied territories. That was so I could speak “with some authority” about it at the conference. I took that as a clear signal that I was meant to talk their book.
I didn’t mind that, if the money was real, and I guess Zurich was meant to show me that too. I’d emailed Sarah, who was already in Jerusalem, and reckoned on her telling me what to say. I was obeying her and, now that Adrian was finished, I reckoned we were back on the same page.
We seemed an odd couple, Toby and me – he the young spook, me the washed-up aidie – to have this geopolitical power play performed just for us. It was like some silly case of mistaken identity, or like we’d won a competition to see how the peace process worked. I couldn’t or wouldn’t take it too seriously, especially in our down time and would send it up to Toby. Did he think Tel Aviv would get a Disneyland? Were we on commission? Could I get a photograph with the cheque – perhaps one of those giant charity ones – at the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre?
“I’m just saying Americans don’t do that kind of thing. They’re too worried about getting into trouble. It wouldn’t happen.”
“But I’m telling you it did, Toby. Maybe he couldn’t resist me.”
“Now you are making it up.”
“Well, thank you very much, Tobes, you’re a gent.”
I didn’t care whether Toby believed me or not. In fact, I rather suspected that he was required not to believe me, otherwise he’d be in possession of salient information that he may have to report. So it was probably easier to keep it at the level of regular banter. For Toby’s sake, I didn’t tell him that I’d damned nearly crippled the American jerk. Maybe ruined his reproductive prospects.
We’d been introduced at a networking event ahead of the conference. Toby had taken his responsibilities as my escort very seriously, installing me in one of his office’s low-rise apartments in a leafy enclave of suburban Jerusalem, and had rarely left me alone as the conference approached. It was convened at the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem University, to the north-east of the city – a sort of white concrete affair that could have been one of England’s more modern universities. We’d sat in the sun on a low wall outside the complex we were using for the conference, next to a small evergreen tree set in a huge concrete planter at an incongruous angle of some forty-five-degrees, so that it had to be supported with a wire hawser.
“Incapability Brown been at the weedkiller?” I said, or something like that.
“Best not say that to anyone else,” said Toby. “It’s a monument to nine who were killed in the cafe here in a Hamas attack, mostly Israelis but Americans too.”
“Sorry. When?”
“A few years ago.”
Mine was to be the middle day of the conference. The media would come for the mid-morning set piece, my little keynote largely drafted by UN staff, then some photo calls. It was during one of the seemingly interminable breaks for coffee and cakes, during which Toby would circulate me around the various conference catchments – Palestinian Arabs, other Arabs, academic Israelis, political Israelis, UN officials, visiting bishops and archbishops, Quartet reps, the party of the junior minister from the Foreign Office, media. And this one American that I counted, called Kevin Schreiber.
“Is he CIA?” I asked Toby.
“No, he isn’t CIA,” he answered with a cod weariness that I didn’t understand. “He works with our office.”
“The Foreign Office?”
“Yes, sort of.”
Schreiber was tall and thin with neat white hair, fit and quite handsome in an uninteresting sort of way. He talked easily and fluently, if in a rather monotone fashion. It seemed odd to talk in such a matter-of-fact way in a crowded room about the little bit of street diplomacy that had brought us together.
“It’s really very straightforward. Toby will bring you to my hotel tomorrow and we’ll run you through the briefing. There’s nothing to it.” I’ve run through this time and again since. It was all meant to be so simple. And, in one respect I suppose it was.
Toby drove me over when the first day of the conference finished. Schreiber was staying at the American Colony in East Jerusalem. Of course he was. It’s a discreet old hotel, built in the Ottoman style, and just right for a sleazy diplomat like Schreiber. Toby pulled up at the front and my door was opened. Toby stayed put.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Not my side of the business.
