Storm Front

Chapter 24

Virgil had found a pair of water wings in the barn, the cheap plastic kind that you blow up and roll up your arms, and he lay back in the creek water. With the barest flutter of his feet, and the support of the water wings, he could keep himself moving. The air temperature had to be in the high nineties, he thought, and when the sun beat down, his body had to be near the boiling point. And when he kicked through the shade of an overhanging burr oak, he felt as though he’d been doused with cool water. At this point in time, there couldn’t be a better place to be, not in the whole universe.

“We better stay in the shade as much as we can, or we’ll burn into a couple of cinders,” Ma said. “That sun is scorching hot.”

She had no trouble floating, Virgil thought, probably because she had built-in water wings. In any case, she was an attractive sight, as they flutter-kicked around the swimming hole. The whole environment was reminiscent of a moment from a Disney movie, Virgil thought, with the lush dark green woods all around, the gurgling of the stream over the broken-down dam, the occasional tiger swallowtail fluttering by; like when Bambi was meeting his first butterfly.

“So what’d that bitch do when you got her to St. Paul?” Ma asked, un-Bambi-like. She was referring to Tal Zahavi.

“Threatened everybody in sight,” Virgil said. “Diplomatic immunity, and all that. They’re gonna lay down for it. Or maybe they don’t have a choice. Whatever happens, it won’t do her spy career a lot of good. They took her to court for an appearance, and there are now twelve thousand news photos of her.”

“Good. She pointed a gun right at my nose. That really… I mean, I thought I might die right there.”

“You could of.”

“Have you ever thought you might die?” she asked. “When you were in a shoot-out?”

He had to think about it. “I’m not sure. I never really thought I was about to die, but I might have thought, Holy shit, you’re about to die, but not believed it, if you know what I mean. You’ve got this voice telling you that, but the voice sounds sarcastic.”

“Mmm.”

“Zahavi would have scared me, too,” Virgil said. “She was a little nuts. Maybe out in the cold too long. She wanted to shoot somebody — wanted to try it out, see how it felt.”

“You’re not gonna put Tag in prison, are you?” Ma asked.

“I don’t know what’ll happen to him,” Virgil said.

“He’s too cute to put in prison,” Ma said. “A double-crossing piece of scum, but I can excuse that, if a man is cute enough.”

“Glad to hear it,” Virgil said. “Davenport says Tag’ll make bail this afternoon, and he’s already scheduled a press conference. He claims he didn’t have any idea that Zahavi had a gun. He was just along for the ride, so that he could be shown handing the stone over to the Israelis. I don’t believe him, but a jury might. If you say you won’t testify against him…”

“Virgil, I just want it to be over,” Ma said. “I’ve got my life to live. I’d just send him home.”

“I kinda think that’s what will happen. Movie stars… prosecutors like movie stars,” Virgil said. “They think if they’re nice to them, maybe they’ll get to be in a movie.”

“Good luck to them,” Ma said. “Whatever happens, Tag brought it on himself. It’s not like you didn’t warn him.”

They paddled around a bit more, and then Virgil said, “Not like I didn’t warn you.”

“Aw, let’s not go there, Virgie,” Ma said. “Not after last night. I never was going to keep the stone. But you surely scratched my itch, and I can’t tell you how nice that was.”

“Not to brag, but I have to say, I think I probably took care of your itch for several months, possibly even a couple of years,” Virgil said.

“Mmm. No. In fact, I feel it coming back on.”

“We’ll think of something,” Virgil said. “Say, you want another beer?”

“You’re not peeing in the water, are you?”

“Ma…”

The night before, after Virgil recovered the stone, he’d spent a half hour talking to everyone involved, making sure that those who needed to be in jail were in jail, and that those who didn’t, weren’t. When all that was done, he told the kids that he was going to take Ma out to get a hot fudge sundae, took her to his house, as he told her, “to get you even further in my debt.”

The next morning, early, he drove up to the Cities without the stone, to work through the paper. The feds were asking about what happened to al-Lubnani, who might be considered an enemy alien, and Virgil explained that he’d disappeared. When they asked about Awad, Virgil said that Awad had worked as his informant during the whole episode — but if word of that got out, he might be murdered. They went away to think about it, and Virgil was confident that Awad was safe.

Awad himself was being hustled on the purchase of a fourteen-year-old utility plane, which Virgil thought he’d probably buy — with hundred-dollar bills, of course.

Ma floated up and put her feet on the stony creek bottom. She was short enough that the water would have come up over her nose, so she had to bounce as she pushed up between Virgil’s ankles. “I do feel bad about Reverend Jones.”

“Nothing anybody can do about that,” Virgil said. Jones was in the security ward at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, after being transferred up from Mankato. He never recovered full consciousness. The docs at Regions had his Mayo medical file electronically transferred, looked at it, looked at Jones, and suggested that the old man be sent home.

“He’s right there at the end,” an oncologist told Virgil. “He’ll never be back, now. His coma is getting deeper. He’ll be dead in a week. He’ll need a lot of morphine, and it’ll save everybody a lot of money if he got it through a hospice service, instead of here.”

Virgil related that to Ma, who teared up for a moment, then splashed some creek water in her eyes and washed the tears away. “That man saved my life,” she said. She’d told Virgil all about it during their extended slumber party. “He hadn’t come along, I had the potential to turn into a real piece of trailer trash.”

“I doubt it — you’re a survivor.” Virgil looked at his watch and said, “Your kids still gone?”

“Another hour or two. Why?”

“We could get back to the house… and then I’ve got to head back to the Cities, now that I’ve recovered the stone.”

“Are you going to tell them the truth about the stone? Your cop buddies?”

“I have to, Ma. You called me this morning and said you’d found it at Jones’s old family place, while you were tearing it down. He must’ve ditched it there. Rolf was a witness — not that anyone will care, since they’ll have the stone.”

“I was amazed when that thing popped out of the wall,” she said. She got in the shallow water, stood up, arched her back, and stretched and yawned. “If we’re gonna do it, we better get ’er done, before the boys get back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

She was a sight.

On the way back to the house, Virgil said, “I got a question for you, Ma. I know you’re smart, because somebody told me. I don’t mean a little smart, or somewhat smart, but really, really smart. When we’re talking, sometimes you use perfect grammar and syntax, and sometime it’s this rednecky ‘slicker’n snot on a doorknob,’ ‘dumber’n a bag a hammers,’ and all that. Why do you do that? Switch back and forth?”

She glanced at him and said, “You’re not totally unperceptive. I’d noticed that.”

“So why?”

“I don’t know. Because people expect it, I guess,” she said. “I drive around in a pickup truck and tear down buildings and I got five boys without daddies… so that’s what they expect. ‘Dumber’n a bag of hammers, dumber’n a barrel of hair, slicker’n owl shit…’ If I act that way… well, they won’t see me coming, if I’m ever in a spot where I don’t want them to see me coming.”

Virgil cupped a hand over his ear and pumped a drop of water out, and said, “Okay. I can buy that.”

“I’m sure you can, since you do the same thing — laid-back surfer-boy bullshit, those band T-shirts and that long blond hair, until you have to be mean. Then you can be meaner than the average rattlesnake.”

“I resemble that remark,” Virgil said.

“Yes, you do,” she said. “So, let’s walk faster. I’ve got a couple new things I want to try. As it turns out, lucky for me, you’re not the bashful sort.”

An hour later, Virgil called Yael and asked, “You packed?”

“I am ready. Do you still have the stone?”

Virgil had called to tell her that he’d recovered the Solomon stone. “Of course. You thought I’d lost it again?”

“Not exactly, but I thought I should inquire, in case I shouldn’t check out.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Virgil said.

He kissed Ma good-bye on the front porch, and as he was walking out to his truck, saw Sam coming down the driveway on his bike, in his Cub Scout uniform. Virgil turned the truck around, stopped next to the kid, and asked, “You fish?”

“When I can.”

“I got a boat. If your mom says okay, we’ll go up to the St. Croix and knock down some muskys,” Virgil said.

“Can you eat muskys?” Sam asked.

Virgil crossed himself. “Never, never ask anything like that. No, you can’t eat muskys. Maybe we should go for walleyes.”

“Either one is good with me,” Sam said. He looked down at the house, then back at Virgil. “You didn’t knock her up, did you?”

“Jesus, I hope not,” Virgil said. “You don’t need another redneck in this family.”

“That’s the goddamned truth,” Sam said, and pedaled on.

On the way to pick up Yael, Virgil called Davenport, who came on and said, “Now if we just had that stone, everything would be somewhat perfect.”

“I’ve got it. Jones apparently ditched it at his old farmstead, and a woman I know is tearing the place down,” Virgil said. “It popped right out of the wall.”

“An amazing coincidence,” Davenport said. “Astonishing, really.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I suspect Jones wanted it found. The money’s probably where he wanted it to go, so… he doesn’t care about the stone anymore. Or maybe he does care, maybe he never wanted to betray his old friends in archaeology. So he left it where we’d find it.”

“Okay,” Davenport said. “Although, I’ve got a feeling that you haven’t looked under all the available rocks.”

“I’ll tell you, Lucas, we really don’t want to do that. At least, not until we hear what’s finally happened with the Hatchet.”

“Got it,” Davenport said. “Speaking of Jones, his daughter’s asking for you. She’s over at the hospital.”

“I’ll stop this afternoon,” Virgil said. “But first, I’m gonna bring the stone up and stick it in the evidence locker, and let you geniuses figure out what to do with it. I’m done with it.”

“See you when you get here.”

And he made a call to Lincoln, the intelligence agent, or whatever she was. He pressed “1” on the double-secret telephone, and she answered two seconds later. “What?”

“I thought I’d give you a chance to say, ‘Thank you,’” Virgil said.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve still got him?”

“Got who?”

“All right. I hope it works out for you,” Virgil said. “Is there any possibility that I’ll ever know how it turns out?”

He could hear her thinking, and then she said, “I’ll tell you what, Virgil. There are some possibilities out there, where we just couldn’t talk to you. I’m not talking about us doing anything illegal, I’m just saying, there are some possibilities.”

“Give me a hypothetical.”

“Hypothetically, if you were in this sort of situation, say, and the target was picked up and eventually agreed to turn—”

“Okay. I got that,” Virgil said. “But listen: if it’s just a straight bust, or you take down a group, but it doesn’t make the papers… give me a ring. I don’t need details, I’d just like to know what happened. How the story came out.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “I have to say, Virgil, you are a journey all of your own, and I hope you enjoy yourself in the rest of it.”

“What do you want me to do with the secret phone?”

“Nothing. In a day or two, it’ll turn itself off, and it’ll never come back. If you open it up, you’ll find that the electronics have been reduced to a brownish goop. I wouldn’t taste it. If, for some reason, we need to talk to you again, we’ll know where to find you.”

“But I won’t know where to find you.”

“That’s correct.”

And she was gone.

When he got to Mankato, he found Sewickey sitting in the parking lot, in his Caddy, with the engine running. Sewickey got out and said, “Thank God. I’ve been here for four hours. I saw all that about the Mossad woman and Bauer on TV, and I figured you’d show up to talk with the Israeli.”

“You’re looking for the photographs?” Virgil asked, remembering that he’d promised them to Sewickey, if Sewickey stayed out of Virgil’s hair.

Sewickey said, “Exactly. I need to get back to Austin. There’re rumors that a piece of parchment has come up on Santorini that mentions a town called ‘Atalant,’ obviously a reference to Atlantis. I’m going, and right quick, but I need to get to Austin first.”

“If you had a camera…”

“I do. A brand-new one. In the Caddy,” he said.

“I’ve got the stone, right here in the truck,” Virgil said. “Get your camera, you can take some shots, and I’ll take a couple of you examining the stone, and we’ll be all square.”

“Virgil, you are a prince among men,” Sewickey said.

“Not so much,” Virgil said. “I figure if you get these photographs, you’ll stick them straight up Bauer’s ass.”

Sewickey laughed. “I will indeed. And make the oil and gas guys happy, at the same time. Who knows, maybe I’ll get my own TV show.”

They went up to Yael’s room with the stone and made three dozen photographs, using a bedsheet as a seamless backdrop, and then a dozen more of Sewickey examining the stone with a magnifying glass, while wearing an Aussie outback hat. Yael did not approve, but conceded that Virgil may have owed something to Sewickey.

Sewickey followed Virgil back to his truck, Virgil carrying the stone, Sewickey towing Yael’s suitcase, while she checked out. As they waited for her, Virgil asked, “Where was this Atlantis parchment found?”

“Santorini. Also known as Thera. It’s in the Cyclades, off Greece. The island is the remains of a volcanic caldera. The volcano blew about three thousand six hundred years ago, and is possibly the origin of the Atlantis myth. If this parchment can be nailed down, that’d certainly support the theory that Santorini was Atlantis.”

Virgil nodded and said, “Pretty nice time of year in the Greek Islands. I took a leave there, when I was in the army.”

“Pleasant,” Sewickey said. “Very pleasant, in fact.”

“Lots of northern Europeans on vacation. Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Germans, Danes…”

“All blond, all the time,” Sewickey said, rubbing his hands together. “Of course, I’ll be there for scholarly reasons and would have no reason to visit the beaches.”

On the way north to the Cities, Virgil filled Yael in on the aftermath of the confrontation the night before, and told her that he’d be leaving the stone with the BCA. The negotiations for its return would be carried out between her, his bosses, the Israeli embassy, and somebody from the State Department. “You’ll probably have to stay here for few more days, but it’s a done deal. You can spend a little more time shopping. Go out to the Mall of America.”

“What about Tal Zahavi?”

“Diplomatic immunity,” Virgil said.

Yael shook her head: “This is one person I do not need to meet when I get back home.”

“I doubt she’ll want to have anything to do with the stone,” Virgil said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of revenge,” Yael said. “I’ll be the only one she can reach.”

Virgil dropped her at the St. Paul Hotel, and continued on to the BCA, where he placed the stele on Davenport’s desk. Davenport peered at it for a moment and said, “That’d look good on my mantel.”

Tal Zahavi, he said, was still in the Ramsey County lockup, and would be for a few more days. According to reports from the jailers, she was in an around-the-clock rage, not that they gave a rat’s ass.

The FBI had called. They’d send somebody down to consult with Raj Awad, Davenport said, but Awad was in the clear.

“I think Awad might be suddenly affluent,” Virgil said.

“Who cares?” Davenport said. “None of this shit has anything to do with us. I just wish they’d keep it over there, wherever that is.”

“I wash my hands of it,” Virgil said. “I’ll go talk to Ellen, see what she has to say, and then I’m gone.”

“Got a date?”

“Hope so,” Virgil said.

Virgil went over to Regions Hospital, a sprawling brick medical palace down the hill from the state capitol. The hospital had a locked ward for the criminal kind, and after going through some rigmarole, Virgil was taken in by a guard. Jones was flat on his back, more tubes going in and out, just as they had been in Mankato. His eyes were closed, and he looked shrunken, as though he’d lost five pounds since the night before.

Ellen was sitting next to him, reading a book. She saw Virgil and he raised his eyebrows, and she looked at her father and shook her head. “We’re arranging for a hospice.”

“I heard from the docs, this morning,” Virgil said.

“I just… I just…”

“I’m sorry.”

She said, “When he was waiting for you at that restaurant, he called me — he called Danny, too, he’s on his way — and told me that he really didn’t want anyone hurt, but he had obligations that he couldn’t escape.”

“I appreciate that, Ellen. I can’t lie to you — he’s still pretty much of an asshole in my book. Ma could have been killed last night, trying to help him out. Part of it was her own fault, but part of it was your father’s, too. Ma felt an obligation to him, and he exploited that.”

“He wasn’t a bad man,” she insisted.

“That’s what Ma says, too.”

“I need a favor from you,” Ellen said. “A big one.”

Virgil shrugged: “I’ll listen. I’ll do what I can.”

“When I was talking to Dad last night, he said he’d made a will, specifying that his body be cremated, and the ashes taken to a grave he’s already arranged, in Israel. It’ll be the grave for Mom, too, when she dies.”

“Yeah?”

“He wants you to take his ashes there,” Ellen said.

“Aw, Ellen…”

“I’d go, but he said I couldn’t — that the Israelis would wind up arresting me and investigating me for this stone business. Same thing for Dan.” She reached out and took Virgil’s wrist. “He said to tell you that you have to do it. That’s the word he used. He said you have to. He said to tell you that you haven’t reached the end of the story yet, and you’ll never know the end until you put his ashes in that grave.”

“Ellen—”

“He said to ask you as the son of an old friend and colleague.”

“Ah, jeez.” Virgil looked down at the dying man and shook his head.

“You haven’t reached the end of the story….”

That gave Virgil something to think about on the way back to Mankato, and it stayed with him, especially at night, before he went to sleep. He hadn’t reached the end of the story?

The story itself went national — not the hassle in Mankato, but the stele itself, and the implications of the inscription.

The Wall Street Journal did the first story, which was amplified by the New York Times, and then it was off to the races. The end of Judaism? They were all Egyptians together? A few of the saner voices suggested that the story, along with the implications, would be gone in a month, and Virgil suspected they were correct; but then, whoever listened to saner voices?

The dalliance with Ma continued, although he stopped calling her Ma. He didn’t tell her, but “Florence” never seemed right to him — she didn’t look like a Florence or a Flo, he thought, probably because he had an aunt named Florence and Ma didn’t look like her; if anything, Ma was an anti-Florence. Then he found out her middle name was Frances, and he started calling her Frankie, which amused her, but seemed okay with everybody.

He even got along with her kids.

Ma and Rolf cleaned up the equipment at the river site, and Virgil tipped off the Blue Earth County deputy who’d been looking for it. The deputy went out, found the lumber, and had it pulled from the river. The wood was stacked out behind the office at the Ponderosa landfill, where, Rolf said, it’d probably rot.

Tal Zahavi was kicked out of the country, Tag Bauer bailed out, and Virgil suspected he’d never come to trial; what Virgil said he’d done just wasn’t important enough to waste money on, especially since the case would be difficult, with the witnesses scattered all over the world.

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.”