Storm Front

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.
    —
    “ Y OU 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?
    —
    T HE 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.
    —
    T AL Z AHAVI 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 . . .”
    —
    V IRGIL ’ 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