Storm Front

by John Sandford

  A week after the auction night, Ellen called to tell him that Jones had died. “He went peacefully,” Ellen said.

  “I’m glad he died peacefully,” Virgil said. He didn’t want to say anything more, because he really hadn’t liked Jones.

  “You promised to take his ashes to Israel.”

  “Well, I didn’t, Ellen. You tried to get me to, but I didn’t.”

  “He said you have to go. He said the case wasn’t over yet, and you are the only one who could solve it.”

  “Ellen . . .”

  —

  VIRGIL’S FATHER was at an interfaith conference in the Twin Cities that week, and Davenport brought Virgil up to talk to an auctioneer named Burton Familie, with whom Virgil had had a previous relationship involving the dispersal of stolen machine-shop equipment through farm estate sales.

  Familie had some information on a boxcar burglary ring, and Davenport wanted it. Familie, on the other hand, wanted an understanding, as he called it, with the BCA. Other people might have called that a criminal conspiracy; it all depended on your point of view. Virgil mediated.

  When that was done, he called his old man, who said that he was at the Parrot Cafe and that he hadn’t ordered yet. The Parrot was ten minutes from the BCA offices and Virgil drove over. He found his old man in a booth in the back, talking with a Catholic priest over cheeseburgers and fries.

  Virgil squeezed in next to his old man, who introduced James McConville, who worked at St. Agnes Church in St. Paul, and was an old friend of his father’s.

  “I had a girlfriend, sort of a musical hippie, back a while ago, she’d take me over there for those orchestral masses,” Virgil told McConville. “I gotta say, that whole Roman Catholic High Mass thing can get a grip on you, with the incense and the Bach and the vestments and the big gold crucifix. . . .”

  “Easy there, Virgil,” his old man said.

  McConville chuckled and said, “We’re still doing the music. Drop by anytime. So, what about this stele from Israel?”

  They chatted for a few minutes about the stone, and Virgil’s father shook his head and said, “Ultimately, it won’t matter much, except to archaeologists and those sorts, and it’ll be another bone picked over by the crazies. Judaism doesn’t depend on the veracity of the Solomon stone any more than Christianity depends on the veracity of the Shroud of Turin. They are artifacts from a past we can’t see.”

  “Jones would disagree,” Virgil said.

  “Because he spent his life digging up artifacts from the past we can’t see,” McConville said.

  “He wasn’t a bad man,” Virgil’s old man said. “I liked him right from the start. He was a tough guy, played rugby back when rugby players ate their dead. Had an intellect on him.”

  “Sort of went down in flames, though. He had a pretty good reputation over there, until he did this,” Virgil said. “He wanted me to take his ashes to Israel for burial. . . . He said the case wouldn’t be over until I did it.” He told them about Ellen’s plea involving her father’s ashes.

  “Are you going?” McConville asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?” Virgil’s father asked.

  “I don’t know. It’d cost too much, for one thing. It’s a long trip. I didn’t really owe him anything.”

  McConville shrugged. “In my opinion, you’ve got to go. I mean, look at everything that happened. If he’s as smart as Lew says he was, and if he says the case isn’t over and only you can settle it . . . how can you not go? I’m not saying you’ve got an ethical obligation, you’ve just got an obligation to your own curiosity. Don’t you?”

  Virgil looked at his father and asked, “Why’d you have to be sitting with this guy? If I go, it’ll cost me ten grand.”

  “The money’s not a problem,” his father said.

  “It’s not? I’m paying fourteen percent on my boat and I’ve got two years to go.”

  “The boat’s your problem,” his father said. “As for taking his ashes to Israel, I’ll write you a check.”

  Virgil thought about that for a minute, then said, “I knew you had money, but I didn’t know you had money.”

  “We’re quite comfortable,” his father said. “So you’ll go?”

  “I can’t handle long flights in tourist class.”

  25

  There were arrangements to be made, but Ellen handled them. She suggested that when he got to Jerusalem, he contact Yuli Gefen, Moshe Gefen’s daughter, to take him out to the cemetery. That was the same Gefen that Yael had seen in Sam’s Club: the bagwoman for Jones’s scam.

  So Virgil went to Israel with a jar full of ashes, business class.

  He carried a letter from the Israeli embassy, about the ashes, to show at customs, if customs wondered what was in the jar. The flight took twelve hours or so from Newark, and landed in Israel in the morning. Virgil walked the ashes through customs, no questions asked, and caught a taxi to the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.

  The hotel reminded him of a couple in Phoenix, with its thick walls and tiles. He got a few hours of sleep, since his body insisted that it was four o’clock in the morning, and then, after consulting with the front desk about the telephone, he called Yuli Gefen. She lived in Tel Aviv, she said, and had to take care of the kids that afternoon and evening, but was anxious to see him. Could she drive up in the morning?

  Virgil said that would be good. Still jet-lagged and out of sorts, he got directions from the desk man again, and walked up a long hill, and eventually found himself in the Old City. In the Old City, he bought a map and went to look at the Western Wall, and did the Stations of the Cross, checked out the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he saw a pilgrim crawling on her knees across the square outside.

  Then he walked through a maze of narrow passages, past merchants selling mostly junk, but also meat and spices and rugs and jewelry and T-shirts and ball caps and almost everything he could think of, but no fishing or boating equipment that he could find, and finally came out at the Dome of the Rock.

  He couldn’t go inside, because it was too late in the day; but from the outside, he thought it one of the most magnificent buildings he’d ever seen.

  —

  AFTER most of a bad night, dreams jumbled with waking moments, he finally got to sleep, and two minutes later, it seemed, was awakened by the call to prayer from a nearby minaret. As he lay there listening to it, he realized that he was no longer in Kansas. Or Minnesota.

  —

  YULI GEFEN was a cheerful, slightly heavy woman who drove a battered Volvo station wagon. “I missed you at Sam’s Club,” Virgil said, and she laughed and said, “Sam’s Club. This is what Israel needs. Pure genius.”

  She denied nothing, but then again, she admitted nothing.

  “I’m past accusing anyone of anything having to do with the stone,” Virgil said. “I’m just curious. Why would you take this risk, even if Magda Jones was a friend of your parents? You could have been arrested and put in jail.”

  She was silent for a while, then asked, “Did Ellen tell you about my son?”

  “Your son? No.”

  “He’s autistic,” she said. “Severely so. He’s smart, you can tell that, but . . . he needs help. He needs a special school where they can help him. My husband is a wonderful man, a scholar, but he doesn’t make anything like the money we would need to send Moshe to the school.”

  “Ah,” Virgil said. “Your son, and Magda . . .”

  “You’re beginning to see the dimensions of this,” she said. “When Elijah called me, what could I say? This is my son, this is his chance.”

  —

  THE CEMETERY was set into a rocky hillside, and a caretaker met them at the gate and said that the grave was ready. There was already a stone on top of the empty grave, and it would be lifted by a couple of laborers, and Virgil would stick the jar i
nside a niche.

  “My mother and father lie in the next grave,” Yuli said. “So these friends travel together to . . . wherever they go.”

  “They all must have been really close,” Virgil said, as they walked down a narrow path on the hillside.

  “Friends as good as you can have in this world,” Yuli said. “You know how, sometimes you meet people, even just one time, and then see them years later, and you are still friends? They were like that: instant friends, but then, they saw each other two or three times a year. It was so sad when Magda began to decline with the Alzheimer’s. It stole her personality away. She was so . . . ebullient.”

  “I understand she will be cared for,” Virgil ventured.

  “Yes. She will.”

  When they got to the grave, Virgil saw that it consisted of two parts: a longer horizontal slab, and a shorter vertical stone. The vertical stone had a simple “Jones” cut into the face. The two laborers lifted the horizontal stone, using pry-bars and blocks, exposing a small square-cut niche below it. Virgil gently fit the copper jar into the space; there was just enough extra room for another jar. The laborers dropped the stone back in place, and the caretaker said, “May God bless all of us.”

  “Amen,” Virgil said.

  Yuli had stepped over to her parents’ gravesite, which, like the Joneses’ plot, had both vertical and horizontal stones, and brushed some leaves away from the inscription. Virgil looked at the vertical stone and said, “Ah, man.”

  “What?” Yuli picked up the tone.

  “Can I use your cell phone?”

  —

  VIRGIL HAD BEEN scheduled to meet Yael that evening for dinner, and now he called her cell. She picked up and said, “Ken?”

  “No, this is Virgil. Listen, do you have the stone?”

  “Well, I don’t have the stone, but yes, it is here.”

  “You’ve got to get the stone and come over,” Virgil said.

  “I can’t take the stone anywhere,” she said. “It is in the vault.”

  “Who can get it out?”

  “Well, the director.”

  “Tell the director to get the stone and get his ass over here,” Virgil said. “Tell him that it will be the most important thing he does this year. Make it fast. It’s really hot here.”

  —

  VIRGIL AND YULI left the cemetery and walked down the street to a little Arab restaurant, sat in the garden and drank apricot juice, and then Diet Coke, and Yuli told Virgil about her father’s life and work, and more about Jones than Virgil had ever wanted to know. They were there for an hour when Yael showed up with a tall bulky man in an olive drab short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, looking like he’d once operated a tank, and enjoyed it, and a thin bearded man wearing round glasses and carrying a bag that looked heavy.

  “The stone,” he said to Virgil.

  The bulky man, who Yael introduced as the director, said, “I hope I don’t waste my time. I had appointments.”

  Yuli said, “This way.”

  They walked back to the cemetery and down the hill to the gravesite. Yael said, “Ahhh,” and the bulky man brightened and said, “I see.”

  “Let’s make sure,” Virgil said.

  The thin man put the bag on the ground, unzipped it, took the stone out, and handed it to Virgil. Virgil stepped over to the black vertical stone over Moshe Gefen’s grave. The rough-cut gravestone had a distinctive protrusion at one end. Virgil took a minute to get it done, but in the end fit the cavity in the bottom of the Solomon stone over the protrusion in the gravestone. The fit was so tight that an ant couldn’t have gotten through on its hands and knees.

  Virgil stepped back and they all looked at it, and then the bulky man laughed. “The grave of the greatest paleographer in Israel, yes? The one man who could make the Solomon stone in his workroom.” He clapped Virgil on the back. “We make a medal for this fuckin’ Flowers, hey?”

  Virgil looked at Yael and said, “You had to tell him, huh?”

  —

  VIRGIL SPENT three more days in Israel, touring. He went down to the Dead Sea, rode a camel, visited Masada, drove up the Jordan Valley past Jericho and all the way to the Sea of Galilee, then toward the Mediterranean through the Jezreel Valley and passed by, but didn’t notice, a hillside that once supported a royal city, where Jezebel the queen had been thrown out a window to be eaten by dogs; now nothing but a rocky hillside. Back in Jerusalem, he found an Arab guide to take him into the Dome of the Rock and saw the stone where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac; or Ishmael, take your pick.

  But three days was all the time he had on his ticket, so he went home, tired, and the day after he got back, slipped back into the swimming hole.

  —

  MA HAD GOTTEN a set of swim fins from one of her kids, and while that was the only thing she was wearing, it gave her a decided advantage over Virgil and she was swimming circles around him.

  “So that finally proved it was a fake, huh?”

  “Hezbollah is saying that they faked the headstone. So, in Israel and in the West, it’s a fake. North, south, and east of Israel, the headstone’s a fake. The question now is, who’s got better propaganda?”

  “That’s the question, huh?”

  “And you want to know the answer?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t care. Don’t care who wins. It’s just a lot of people throwing bullshit at each other. Even if the stone had been real, it would have been some pharaoh throwing bullshit at the locals. The BC version of Fox News.”

  Virgil paddled out from under the shade tree and put up a hand to block out the sun. Ma said, “Tag called me.”

  “Yeah? What’d he want?”

  “Wants me to appear on his television show,” she said. “They want to reenact his car getting shot at. They want me to come on with my shotgun.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “To go fuck himself.”

  “Good for you. You have the Flowers seal of approval.”

  “What more could a girl hope for?” she said, and then: “Oh, wait—I just thought of something. . . .”

  —

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