Storm Front

fly-fishing for carp, the part about stalking tailing carp in shallow water.
    —
    Y AEL WAS bright and cheerful and drinking coffee when Virgil arrived at the hotel’s restaurant at eight o’clock the next morning. He slid into the booth across from her, and she said, “I am completely screwed. I slept well until one o’clock this morning and then I woke up. I haven’t been back to sleep since. About four o’clock this afternoon, I am going to die.”
    Virgil said, “Maybe we’ll be done by four. I couldn’t find him last night, I looked, but he only lives about a half-mile from here. We’ll check his house again, and if we don’t find him, we’ll check with his daughter and see if she knows where he is. If she does, we’ll pick him up, get the stele, and send you off to Macy’s.”
    “Macy’s and then this Best Buy. Everybody says I should go to Best Buy for good prices.”
    “Well, there are lots of them around,” Virgil admitted.
    “But first, the stele,” she said.
    “First, I need some pancakes,” Virgil said.
    During the pancakes, he quizzed her on the investigation of Jones, trying to figure out what she’d been lying about the day before: “I don’t want to hassle the wrong guy.”
    “He’s not the wrong man,” she said. She detailed the investigation into Jones, including his positive identification by several unconnected individuals in two countries, as well as some exit photos at the airport in Cyprus, and entry checks at Minneapolis.
    “It was him, all right,” she concluded.
    Virgil said, “You know, just off the top of my head, I would have thought that if you were going to steal an Israeli stele, you might try to sneak it out of the country. I mean this place he stole it from—is it in a town, or out in the countryside, or what?”
    “Out in the countryside, east of the city of Beth Shean, very close to the Jordan River.”
    “Okay. Now, Jones has a Ph.D. from an actual legitimate university, so he’s probably not stupid. If he’d stolen the stele and then reburied it, say, a few hundred yards away, who would have known? He could have pretended to be as mystified as everyone else. When it was time for him to leave, he could dig up the stone, pack it in his luggage, get a boat out of town. Who’s to know?”
    “But he didn’t do that,” she said. “I told you what he did.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense,” Virgil said. “I mean, look at it. He finds the stone, digs it up, steals it, steals a car, drives it to the car agency, where it can be traced instantly—he could have left it in a parking lot somewhere, and you might still be looking for it. Then, dressed as an American Christian minister in a big black suit with a white collar, who speaks good Hebrew, he calls a taxi and overtips the driver. Then he gets a ride out of the country with these Germans, who everybody in the marina knows. He then pees blood into the harbor in Cyprus, so that everybody will be sure to remember him there, and flies home, where he’s met by an ambulance crew. He couldn’t have left a clearer, faster trail to follow if he’d been dropping ten-dollar bills at each step.”
    “We considered that,” Yael said. “It does seem a little curious—but.”
    “But?”
    “But he stole the stele,” she said. “That’s very clear. I don’t care if he snuck out of the country by getting Tinker Bell to sprinkle fairy dust on his ass. I just want the stele.”
    “Your English is very good,” Virgil observed.
    “Thank you.”
    “And you know about Tinker Bell?”
    “Of course. My parents have had a condo on South Beach, in Miami Beach, for forty years,” she said. “I was born there. I’ve been to Disney World eight or nine times.”
    “Ah. So you’re actually an American?” Virgil asked.
    “No. I could have been, but I chose Israel,” she said.
    —
    O N THE WAY OVER to Jones’s house, Virgil went back to Jones’s departure from Israel. “Are you telling me that he stole the car, drove to this city on the coast . . .”
    “Haifa.”
    “Yeah, Haifa. Then he drops the car at the Avis agency, which he just happens to know where it is, catches a cab before dawn, gets a ride to a specific marina, where he finds two Germans willing to smuggle him out of Israel, no questions asked . . . and he didn’t prearrange it? And, of course, he couldn’t prearrange it, because he didn’t know the stele would be found.”
    “The diggers left the
tel
at noon and locked