Storm Front

there first, so if they follow me, they don’t see you arrive. Now, I have to hurry back so I am not suspected. I tell them, ten minutes for these chips and soda water.”
    “Four o’clock,” Virgil said. And after Awad was gone, thought,
Them?
    —
    V IRGIL SAT in the truck for a couple of minutes—nothing to do, really—and thought about Ma. Since he
didn’t
have anything better to do, and since Ma was the wild card, playing a game he didn’t understand, maybe he could put some pressure on her.
    He was about to head out to her farm, when he took a call from Yael Aronov: “I am at this Sam’s Club. You should come here quickly.”
    “Jones is there?”
    “No, not Jones. Is a woman I know from Israel. She is shopping. I do not know her, exactly, but I recognize her. She is the daughter of Moshe Gefen, who was the most famous paleographer in Israel. This cannot be a coincidence.”
    Virgil turned the truck around and headed for Sam’s Club, while Yael explained that a paleographer studied ancient writing.
    “So she would have an interest in the stone,” Virgil said.
    “Well—I don’t know her, I have only seen her at picnics, but I believe she is involved in high tech. Computer programming. As far as I know, she has no interest in paleography herself.”
    “Maybe she’s here for her father—but you said he
was
the most famous.”
    “He died six or seven months ago. Sometime like that. This was a big event in the archaeology circles. He was a winner of the Israel Prize, he was world famous in Jerusalem. But I tell you, if he were still alive, he would be the one chosen to lead the study of the stele.”
    “But if she’s not a whatchamacallit, why is she here?” Virgil asked.
    “Not for the shopping, I think,” Yael said. “But the answer . . . we have to ask her.”
    Another bidder?
Virgil wondered.
    The woman’s name was Yuli Gefen, and when Virgil got to Sam’s Club, and managed to badge himself past the bulldog guard at the door, she was not to be found. In fact, he had to call Yael just to find
her
in the cavernous store.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, when they finally got together next to a pallet of generic toilet paper, “I didn’t want her to see me, so I kept hiding, and then, once, I couldn’t find her again.”
    “Maybe she saw you,” Virgil said.
    “This is possible,” Yael said. She stopped to gaze, apparently awestruck, at the mountain of toilet tissue. Then: “But it’s also possible that she is still here. We could look for a week.”
    “So let’s look some more,” Virgil said.
    They did, but Gefen was apparently gone.
    —
    V IRGIL CALLED E LLEN C ASE , who answered but said, “I’m not sure I’m talking to you.”
    “Things haven’t changed—they’re just as bad as they were,” Virgil said. “I have a question for you. Have you heard the name Moshe Gefen?”
    “Moshe? Sure—he’s my father’s oldest friend in Israel. Actually, oldest friend, period. His wife was my mother’s best friend, period. They were. They’re both dead now. They died early.”
    “How did they know each other? Your parents and the Gefens?”
    “They knew each other forever,” Ellen said. “Dad was in Israel at the time of the 1967 war, they were both students. Dad was studying Hebrew, and Moshe was studying German, which Dad spoke pretty well, so they were teaching each other. Dad had this old Ford that he’d fixed up, and they’d drive all over the country. When the mobilization started for the war, they were way up by Lebanon, and Moshe had to get to his unit, which was all the way down at the other end of the country, near Beersheba. Dad drove him down, but when they got there, his whole unit had already moved south, so Dad drove south toward the Egyptian border. . . . He had a whole car full of soldiers. Moshe got to his unit—he was wounded a couple of days later—and Dad wound up driving Israeli soldiers all over the place. It was chaos for a while, the way they told it. Then when Moshe got wounded, Dad picked him up at a field hospital and drove him back to Beersheba, to another hospital. They’ve been friends all their lives, Dad and Moshe, Mom and Hannah. Hannah died, let me see, four or five years ago, of a lung disease. Probably from going to too many digs, you know, they breathe in all that dust.”
    Virgil said, “Okay.”
    “Why?”
    Virgil hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Do you know Gefen’s daughter? Yuli?”
    “Yuli? Of course.