Storm Front

prayer from a nearby minaret. As he lay there listening to it, he realized that he was no longer in Kansas. Or Minnesota.
    —
    Y ULI G EFEN 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.”
    —
    T HE 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 inside 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?”
    —
    V IRGIL 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.”
    —
    V IRGIL AND Y ULI 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