Storm Front

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.”
    —
    S O , 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