Storm Front

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.
    —
    V IRGIL 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.”
    —
    “A H , BOY ,” V IRGIL 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.”
    —
    I NSIDE , THE CRIME-SCENE GUY , whose name was Simon Hamm, and who was often