Storm Front

Chapter 4

When Yael walked out of the house, Virgil was in his truck, talking to Davenport.

“… up my ass,” he said. “This thing is gonna turn into a screaming nightmare.”

“I didn’t know. Nobody knew,” Davenport said.

“I’ll tell you what, Lucas. We gotta find Jones in the next ten minutes, get that stone back, and get Yael out of here,” Virgil said. “If that’s blood in there… And with that runner this morning, there’s gotta be somebody else involved. Yael says she has no idea who it might be.”

“I’m hearing you. When will we know if it’s blood?”

“Pretty quick. The Mankato crime-scene guy will be over in a few minutes. I mean, I could probably get a paper towel and put a little spit on it…”

“Maybe you ought to wait for the crime-scene guy,” Davenport said.

“Yeah, yeah. Ah, poop. Here she comes. I’m gonna jump down her throat.”

“Go ahead. Do it in a nice way. Remember, they’re our allies.”

He hung up the phone as Yael popped the passenger-side door and asked, “Am I invited in?”

Virgil said, “Yeah, climb in.”

“I was talking to the police officers,” she said, as she got into the passenger seat and closed the door. “They think it’s blood. They’re almost sure it is.” Virgil eyed her for a moment, and she finally asked, “What is it?”

“Yael, you’ve been lying like a mm…” He suppressed the “motherfucker.” “You’ve been lying, and you forgot that everybody has cell phones. I talked to some people at the dig, and they all know what the stele said. I can guarantee it’ll be in the New York Times in the next few days.”

“That’d be terrible.”

“Whatever. Now, what I think is, you’re going to tell me everything you know or I’m gonna kick your ass out of the truck and you can do your investigation from a taxicab,” Virgil said.

“That’s not fair.”

“Not fair? Gimme a break,” Virgil said. “You think it’s fair that I should go looking for somebody and not know who else is around, when there’s blood on the floor? Am I gonna get shot investigating this thing? Is somebody else going to get shot? Has somebody already been shot? Is this thing worth killing for?”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “Answer! Is it worth killing for?”

She mumbled, “Who knows? Maybe. To some crazies.”

“Israeli crazies? American crazies?”

She shrugged. “Palestinian crazies, Syrian crazies, Egyptian crazies, maybe a couple of Israeli crazies. Turks. Some Americans, too, I suppose. Maybe the Pope.”

“The Pope?”

“Okay, maybe not the Pope.” She hesitated, and said, “Then again… maybe.”

“Maybe? Why didn’t you tell me that last night, or this morning?” Virgil asked. “You walked me right into a place where there was probably a crime under way, and you gave me no warning.”

“All right, all right.” She waved a hand at him, as if to dismiss unwarranted whining. “I’ll tell you. There may be some propaganda value in this stele, if it’s real. That’s a big if. I didn’t know anybody else would be here, or I would have warned you. Now that I do, it’s obvious what happened.”

“Oh, really? It’s not obvious to me,” Virgil said.

“Okay, so let me tell you. Jones is trying to sell it. Being in Israel as much as he is, he knows about the antiquities market, and he knows who the big buyers are. He also knows what this thing is worth… if it’s real.”

“Well, is it real?”

She seemed to be thinking for a moment, then sighed and said, “It’s got a very good provenance. It was uncovered at a major dig site, by people of the highest reputation and the greatest experience, with thirty witnesses. They actually photographed it coming out of the ground. Highly detailed photographs taken with a Nikon D800. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this camera…”

“I own one. Keep talking.”

“So, I looked at the photos and the earth around the stone did not appear to be disturbed at all… and usually you can tell. Or, at least, the diggers can. Old compacted dirt is different than new compacted dirt. So it appears to be very real.”

“The people I talked to at the dig… What’s a tel? She said she was at a tel.”

“It’s a hill, a mound, that covers the site of an ancient city.”

“Okay. The people working on this tel said that there are several people there who can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and they had a hieroglyphics dictionary, too, and that they’re pretty sure it’s about some guy called Semen and about Solomon—”

“It’s not semen. Semen is—”

“I know what semen is. Just tell me.”

So, she told him.

“There was a pharaoh named Siamun. Not semen. He became pharaoh around 986 BCE, which was about the middle of the reign of King David,” Yael said. “That’s according to the traditional dates. He overlapped with King Solomon, who was David’s sole surviving heir… after he finished killing off David’s other sons, anyway. If you believe the Bible.”

“Do you believe in it? The Bible?”

She shrugged. “Some parts of the histories, yes. Most of it is foundation myths, tall tales, and literature. Do you believe in Moby Dick?”

“Moby Dick is a novel, not a history,” Virgil said.

“Do you believe in the details about whaling ships and whaling boats and all that? All the detail in the novel?”

“Some of it, I guess. Yeah, most of it.”

“That’s the Bible,” Yael said. “I believe some of it.”

“So… what does the stele have to do with this?” Virgil asked.

“It’s a triumphal stele, that may have been in secondary use—”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that it might have been brought from somewhere else, thousands of years ago. It was originally a pillar, then got thrown down and broken up, and finally might have been used as a foundation stone or a cutting block or something, by people who didn’t know what it was,” she said. “This tel is only about five klicks east of Beth Shean, which was an Egyptian administrative city, off and on, over the centuries. Anyway, there is an inscription on it….”

The inscription, Yael said, was in two languages: an extremely primitive form of Hebrew, and in hieroglyphics.

“The problem is, mmm, Hebrew is a more or less phonetic language, but in the very earliest versions, there are some unfamiliar letters that are not yet fully evolved, and perhaps the phonics, the sounds made by the individual letters, had not yet completely solidified.”

“Okay…”

“Okay… so the stele seems to describe a routine victory by Siamun, over a not-very-big city. We don’t know which one. That part of the stone is missing.”

“So what?”

“So… the Hebrew version, on the other side of the stele, seems to describe exactly the same victory, in very much the same words, but this time, the victory is ascribed to Solomon.”

Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I don’t know what that means, either.”

“Well, there are a lot of odd things about Solomon,” Yael said. Then: “That police officer wants you.”

Virgil looked up at Jones’s house, where one of the cops beckoned to him. He leaned past Yael and called, “Give me two minutes.”

The cop waved and went back inside.

Virgil said to Yael, “Keep going.”

“If you read the Bible closely, and if the Bible is correct, you realize that David was not a rich and powerful king. He ran a small kingdom — in the beginning, you could walk from one end of it to the other in a single day, and it was mostly rural and poor. It got much larger during his reign, but never particularly rich. It was almost like David was the leader of a motorcycle gang, instead of a real king.”

Virgil nodded: “I remember that much, from Bible class. But Solomon…”

“Solomon suddenly has enormous riches, and a huge treasury, and seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and the Queen of Sheba comes all the way from Sheba, which is way at the far end of the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen, to sleep with him,” Yael said. “That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense for a ruler of an insignificant kingdom that had always been under the thumb of the Egyptians.”

“I still don’t know what it means,” Virgil said.

She slapped him sharply on the thigh with an open hand: “Think, idiot. If this stele is real, it suggests that Siamun might have been the model for Solomon. Might have been the real Solomon. That there was no Jewish Solomon — that David’s kingdom was taken over by an Egyptian pharaoh named Siamun, who became the Jewish Solomon in the early tales, probably through transcription errors and changes in early Hebrew phonetics. The Bible wasn’t put together until three or four hundred years after Solomon, or Siamun, died, so the Bible writers were relying on oral histories and maybe a few inscriptions. Things get warped.”

“So, uh, the biggest king of the Jews…”

“Yes. Was an Egyptian. If the stele is real. In Israel, that’s a development we’d call ‘unfortunate.’ David’s important both to Christians and Muslims, too — in fact, the Messiah is supposed to be descended from David. Well, Solomon killed all of David’s surviving sons, according to the Bible. He was the last one left. So if you trace the lineage back… Jesus is descended not from the Jewish David, but the Egyptian pharaoh Siamun.”

“That’s not something you hear every day,” Virgil admitted.

“No kidding. The crazies all over the Middle East already deny that Israel is a legitimate Jewish homeland. If it turns out that Solomon was an Egyptian, well, it’s another stick on the fire. A pretty big stick, too.”

“And if you had some kind of proof of that, like a stele, you could probably sell it for the big bucks.”

“That’s what we think.”

“Ah, boy,” Virgil said. “Yesterday, I was investigating a redneck woman who was selling fake antique barn lumber. Today, I’m up to my crotch in Solomon.”

“Who’d want real antique barn lumber?” Yael asked.

“Rich people,” Virgil said. “Mostly on the East Coast.”

“Ah,” she said, as though she understood completely.

A city van pulled up, and a man hopped out. “That’s the crime-scene guy,” Virgil said. “Let’s go see if it’s blood.”

She opened the truck door but before she got out, Virgil said, “One more question.”

“Yeah?”

“Does this stele have any special powers?” Virgil asked.

“What?”

“I mean, if you mess with it, could you be struck by lightning or be carried up in a whirlwind, or something?”

“Maybe you could be struck by lightning, if you carried it out on a golf course during a thunderstorm,” she said. “Or, you could drop it on your foot. It’s heavier than a concrete block, because it’s not hollow. It’s got a really sharp edge. That would hurt a lot.”

“Still, that’d be better than taking a hundred million volts in the back of the neck because you pissed off Yahweh,” Virgil said.

“Virgil…”

“Just pulling your weenie,” he said. “Let’s go see what the cops want.”

Inside, the crime-scene guy, whose name was Simon Hamm, and who was often called Simple, even to his face, was kneeling in the hallway with his eye about a quarter inch above the smear on the floor.

Virgil said, “Hey, Simon. Is it blood?”

Hamm looked up and said, “Hand me one of those paper towels from the kitchen.”

Virgil walked across the living room to the kitchen, got a paper towel, and brought it back. Hamm said, “We got the main smear, but we’ve also got a couple little drops that are otherwise useless.” He spit on the paper towel and scrubbed one of the spots, then looked at the towel.

“Yep, it’s blood,” he said. He held up the towel so Virgil could see the crimson smear.

“That makes my day,” Virgil said. “Though it’s not much blood.”

“Not much, but it’s more than you’d get from nicking your finger with a bread knife,” Hamm said. “The other thing is, it’s all in one spot. It’s not like he was dripping a little blood — it’s like he was bleeding and not moving.”

“This doesn’t seem good,” Yael said.

“See, recognizing that — that’s why you’re a highly paid investigator,” Virgil said.

“So what do we do next?”

Virgil looked at his watch. “First, we’ll go through the house, in detail, to see if he hid the stone here. Then, we’ll run up to the Twin Cities and see if we can surprise his daughter. Maybe Jones is hiding out with her.”

Hamm escorted them through the house. He didn’t want them in it at all, because of the possibility that a violent crime had been committed, but Virgil insisted on looking for places that the stele might be hidden.

“The problem with that is, the guy who was here when you came in — he might have left prints, but we don’t know where,” Hamm said. “If you go digging around, you’ll ruin them.”

“So you open the doors,” Virgil said. “We’ll just look.”

And that’s what they did. They went through two bedrooms, a third bedroom that had been converted to a study, two bathrooms, a small home office niche, the living room, and the basement, and then out to the garage. They found no sign of a stele, no body, and no further evidence of violence. The Nissan Xterra was still in the garage, still covered with garage dust. Although Jones had apparently been home, he hadn’t moved the truck. Virgil looked inside, to see if he might have stashed the stone there, but the truck was empty.

In the house, one living room wall was devoted to photographs, mostly small, and mostly taken at a variety of digs in Israel, featuring Jones and a cheerful, slightly overweight woman Virgil thought was probably Jones’s wife. Yael pointed out various well-known Israelis, posing with Jones. “This is Jones with Yigael Yadin, probably the most famous archaeologist in Israel, after the War of Independence,” Yael said. “They look very friendly together. I confess, I am impressed.”

“This can’t be right,” Vigil said of another. “He’s playing golf by the Pyramids.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to Egypt,” Yael said. “But I tell you, in my job, I travel to sites all over Israel, and there are sites here that I haven’t seen. I believe this one is Samaria, on the West Bank, it must have been years ago. He was digging near Jericho… here.” She tapped a photo. “Not the best place for a Jew.”

“Maybe not so bad for a Lutheran,” Virgil said. “Especially one with a bushy black beard.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

There were three or four photos, wide-angle shots, taken in Minnesota at what looked like ministerial conferences. Virgil examined them closely, then said to Yael, pointing at a sandy-haired man at the edge of one of the shots, “This is my father. Must’ve been twenty years ago. He would have been maybe ten years older than I am now.”

She nodded. “I see the resemblance. Was he disappointed that you didn’t follow in his footsteps?”

“No, he knew I’d never had a call to the ministry. He was just hoping I wouldn’t become a moonshiner or a stock-car driver. Being a cop was just fine with him: he imagines that I’m on the side of the angels.”

“You’re not?”

Virgil shook his head: “There’re not many angels around anymore. Not in my work.”

Hamm threw them out when they didn’t find the stone, or anything that might have the stone in it, and told them not to come back too soon. “This will take a while. What do I do if Jones shows up?”

“Bust him,” Virgil said. “We have a warrant for him and an Israeli extradition request.”

“I haven’t arrested anyone in fifteen years,” Hamm said.

“So, get one of the other guys to do it. Or, you know, just say, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and make him sit on the couch until somebody else gets here.”

“So that’s how it’s done now,” Hamm said, scratching his neck. “I don’t remember it being that easy.”

Two minutes later, Virgil and Yael were on their way to the Twin Cities. Virgil had gotten Jones’s daughter’s name from the old woman next door, and had found her phone number on a list tacked inside a kitchen cabinet, next to a telephone.

He called Davenport with that information, and asked for a callback, detailing where Ellen Case worked. Davenport said he would give it to his researcher, Sandy, and Sandy called back ten minutes later with a home address and the information that Case was a highway engineer with the state Department of Transportation.

“Call her and tell her to stay where she’s at, so we don’t have to chase all over town,” Virgil told her. “We’ll be there in an hour and a half, or so.”

“I’ll call her,” Sandy said.

When he was off the phone, Yael said, “If she’s involved in this plan, she may warn her father.”

Virgil nodded. “Maybe.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“No, because I plan to scare the shit out of her,” Virgil said. “I’ll draw her a picture of how her career ends in disgrace, how she might spend fifteen years in an Israeli prison. Or maybe a Minnesota prison. I’ll tell her about the blood on the floor, and that if she lies to us, she may be involved in a murder conspiracy, which is thirty years’ hard time in Minnesota. She’s a bureaucrat: she’ll know all about cutting her losses.”

Sandy called back a few minutes later and said, “She’s not working. She’s on vacation. A guy at her office said she’s getting over a divorce, and decided to take a long wandering trip to Alaska. By car.”

“Well… that’s a poke in the eye,” Virgil said.

“That’s what I thought,” Sandy said.

Virgil got off the phone, told Yael, who said, “I suspect this is a ploy. It’s too convenient that she is on a vacation so far away, while her father dies.”

“You really do speak good English,” Virgil said. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and waited for a line of traffic to pass so he could make a U-turn. “I’ve never heard anybody use the word ‘ploy.’”

“Perhaps because you live in a rural state?”

“What?”

He made the u-turn and they headed back south, and had gone about three hundred yards when he took another call, this one from a Mankato cop named Georgina. She said that Mankato had collected tag numbers on forty-two Toyota Camrys that might have been considered champagne, depending on who was considering it.

“I would say it would probably run from gold to silver,” she said. “Anyway, you said something about this guy might be a Middle Easterner, so when I ran the numbers, I was looking for something that might be relevant. The good news is, an Arab-sounding guy popped up, a student here at the U, so I thought I’d give you a ring. His name is Faraj Awad. You want the address now?”

“I do,” Virgil said. He wrote it on a notepad. “Thank you. Now, what’s the bad news?”

“My husband gets back tonight, unless he gets stuck in Chicago,” she said. “I probably won’t make it down to the Coop.”

“Aw, man — Wendy’s playing.”

“You know I’d give anything to be there,” she said. “But Ralph’s gonna want his pound of flesh.”

“Well, shoot — make it if you can. Don’t bring Ralph.”

“He wouldn’t be caught dead doing a two-step,” Georgina said.

“This could be interesting,” Yael said, when Virgil told her about Awad. “If we can get passport details, maybe I can talk to somebody in Israel and get more information.”

Virgil called and told Davenport about the change of circumstance. Davenport put him on hold, and came back in one minute: “He’s got a Minnesota driver’s license. Been here for at least two years.”

On the way back to Mankato, Virgil and Yael spent most of the drive time talking about the Solomon stone, archaeology, and about the differences between Minnesota and Israel. There were many; in fact, there were almost no similarities, geographically, climatically, ethnically, or culturally. Minnesota was about nine times larger than Israel in land area, but Israel had about two million more people.

“Everything here is so green. In Israel, we have more tan,” she said. She examined a farm they were passing, and sniffed at the distinctive aroma: “And you have far more pigs.”

She also tried to nap, but without success: “I hate jet lag,” she groaned, after ten minutes with her eyes closed. She sat up and smacked her lips. “My mouth tastes like a hoopoe has been roosting in it.”

“A what?”

“A hoopoe. It’s our national bird.”

“Ah,” Virgil said. “Minnesota’s state bird is the rotisserie chicken.”

“A chicken?”

“It’s because we’re a rural state,” Virgil said. “You know, the politicians have to please the farmers.”

“I’ll have to look them up, these chickens,” Yael said. “If you see one, point it out.”

“I will do that,” Virgil said.