Storm Front

the cemetery and down the hill to the gravesite. Yael said, “Ahhh,” and the bulky man brightened and said, “I see.”
    “Let’s make sure,” Virgil said.
    The thin man put the bag on the ground, unzipped it, took the stone out, and handed it to Virgil. Virgil stepped over to the black vertical stone over Moshe Gefen’s grave. The rough-cut gravestone had a distinctive protrusion at one end. Virgil took a minute to get it done, but in the end fit the cavity in the bottom of the Solomon stone over the protrusion in the gravestone. The fit was so tight that an ant couldn’t have gotten through on its hands and knees.
    Virgil stepped back and they all looked at it, and then the bulky man laughed. “The grave of the greatest paleographer in Israel, yes? The one man who could make the Solomon stone in his workroom.” He clapped Virgil on the back. “We make a medal for this fuckin’ Flowers, hey?”
    Virgil looked at Yael and said, “You had to tell him, huh?”
    —
    V IRGIL SPENT three more days in Israel, touring. He went down to the Dead Sea, rode a camel, visited Masada, drove up the Jordan Valley past Jericho and all the way to the Sea of Galilee, then toward the Mediterranean through the Jezreel Valley and passed by, but didn’t notice, a hillside that once supported a royal city, where Jezebel the queen had been thrown out a window to be eaten by dogs; now nothing but a rocky hillside. Back in Jerusalem, he found an Arab guide to take him into the Dome of the Rock and saw the stone where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac; or Ishmael, take your pick.
    But three days was all the time he had on his ticket, so he went home, tired, and the day after he got back, slipped back into the swimming hole.
    —
    M A HAD GOTTEN a set of swim fins from one of her kids, and while that was the only thing she was wearing, it gave her a decided advantage over Virgil and she was swimming circles around him.
    “So that finally proved it was a fake, huh?”
    “Hezbollah is saying that they faked the headstone. So, in Israel and in the West, it’s a fake. North, south, and east of Israel, the headstone’s a fake. The question now is, who’s got better propaganda?”
    “That’s the question, huh?”
    “And you want to know the answer?”
    “Sure.”
    “I don’t care. Don’t care who wins. It’s just a lot of people throwing bullshit at each other. Even if the stone had been real, it would have been some pharaoh throwing bullshit at the locals. The BC version of Fox News.”
    Virgil paddled out from under the shade tree and put up a hand to block out the sun. Ma said, “Tag called me.”
    “Yeah? What’d he want?”
    “Wants me to appear on his television show,” she said. “They want to reenact his car getting shot at. They want me to come on with my shotgun.”
    “What’d you tell him?”
    “To go fuck himself.”
    “Good for you. You have the Flowers seal of approval.”
    “What more could a girl hope for?” she said, and then: “Oh, wait—I just thought of something. . . .”
    —
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