Storm Front (16 page)

The overhead light went out, and she started, listening, but couldn’t hear anything but the muffled groans from Case.

She checked the tape, as best she could in the dark, then opened the garage’s access door and waved Kohl into the driveway. He pulled in, and together they wrestled the struggling woman into the back of their van. She looked, Kohl thought, like a giant joint in a stoner film.

“You didn’t have to hurt her?” Kohl asked, a pleading note in his voice.

“I might have had to slap her a couple of times,” Zahavi said, with evident satisfaction.

“Another felony,” Kohl said. He began to weep. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

“Pick another God,” Zahavi said. “And slow down. Slow down. We do not hurry.”

Case struggled and cried and begged, and was echoed by Kohl, but they made it out of town and south on I-35. They’d rented a hotel room, but it was two hours away, and they needed to drive circumspectly. A police stop would
really
have been the end. An hour south, they got off the interstate and turned east, cruising comfortably across the countryside in the dark. Case had gone quiet.

They arrived at the hotel, on the outskirts of the City of Rochester, after two o’clock. They had the two end units, and smuggled Case into the room at the far end.

“I’m going home,” Kohl announced.

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no . . .”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Case begged, from inside the bag.

“No going home now,” Zahavi said to Kohl. “Too late for that.”

She sounded pleased with herself.

—

V
IRGIL WAS ASLEEP
before midnight. With the unconscious sleep-time clock that ran in the back of his head, he knew he’d been down for quite a while when he started dreaming that he was feeding automobile scrap into a hammer mill, and that garbage cans were falling down a stairway, that a Caribbean steel drum band was playing in his backyard. . . .

Then his eyes cracked open and he heard all of that, plus somebody screaming, “Virgil! Virgil! Get up, Virgil.”

Virgil rolled out of bed, grabbed his jeans, started pulling them on as he stumbled to the front door. Somebody was pounding on the aluminum screen door, and they were panic-stricken. He got to the door, flicked on the porch light, and saw the bald head of his across-the-street neighbor, Robbie. He pulled his jeans up the last two inches and popped the door.

Robbie shouted at him, “Your garage is on fire.”

“What?” He didn’t comprehend that for a split second, and Robbie screamed again and pointed to his left, and Virgil saw the flickering light in the side yard.

He thought,
The boat!

Virgil turned and bolted back through the house, into the kitchen, yanked open the cabinet under the kitchen sink, pulled out his fire extinguisher, ran through the mudroom, out the back door—barefoot—and around to the side of the garage.

An oval of flame was licking up the clapboard siding, and Robbie came running around from the front and shouted, “I called the fire department, they’re coming. Where’s your hose?”

Virgil shouted back, “On the other side of the back steps, it’s already connected,” and Robbie ran toward the steps. Virgil pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the handle, and foam began blowing out into the flames.

He could knock down the flames for a few seconds, but when he moved on to another section, the fire returned to the first, but he continued hosing it down, making some progress, and kept thinking about the boat: the boat was inside, his pride and joy, a like-new Ranger Angler, with a couple of years yet to go on the financing.

Robbie came running back, and Virgil realized the other man was still in his pajamas, and he was dragging the hose and turned the nozzle and fired it into the flames. The fire extinguisher ran out of foam and Virgil grabbed the hose and moved in close and Robbie shouted, “Watch your feet,” and, “Here’s the fire department.”

The firemen came at a run, pulling hose, and hammered the fire with a flood of foam that the fire couldn’t compete with: in less than a minute, it was gone, but Virgil shouted, “We gotta look inside.”

He got the garage door up, but there was no fire inside. He started to step inside and a fireman caught his arm, held him back. “Don’t do that, there might have been some structural weakening.”

Virgil walked back out, calmer now, and asked, “What the hell happened?”

“Did you have gasoline out here or something? I can smell gas,” a fireman said.

“There was no gas out here,” Virgil said. “There’s a can in the garage . . . still there, right by the lawn mower.”

“Hate to say it,” said another fireman. “It looks like a Molotov cocktail. Like somebody threw one at the side of the garage.” He pointed to the top of the oval. “It broke there. Splattered, ran down the wall.”

“He’s a cop,” Robbie said.

The second fireman said, “That could explain—”

Virgil said, “Yeah but . . .” And the thought struck him. “Ah, shit,” he said, and he turned and ran back into the house, to the study.

The stone was gone.

—

V
IRGIL FELT LIKE SCREAMING
,
but he didn’t. The first thing he did was look around, to make sure he hadn’t simply moved it, and had forgotten about it, but he hadn’t, and he knew that when he looked. Then he went to the tracker pad: no sign of Ellen’s car.

But it
had
to be Ellen, one way or the other. Nobody else, other than Davenport and Yael, knew that the stone was in his house. He tried to call her, but after five rings, her phone sent him to the answering service. He left a simple message: “Call me when you get this, and I may not go for a warrant for your arrest on charges of arson, burglary, grand theft, and aggravated assault.”

He took no satisfaction from the message: he’d warned everyone, several times, that they were playing with fire, and virtually every one of them had ignored him.

—

B
ACK OUTSIDE
,
the firemen were cleaning up, and the man in charge told him that the damage had been minimal, and confined to the garage siding. There were no structural problems, and the boat was untouched. “Not to say that it wasn’t serious. If your neighbor hadn’t seen it go up, and you guys hadn’t gotten out there, the roof would have caught and then it’d have been Katie-bar-the-door.”

When the firemen and the rubbernecking neighbors had drifted away, and Virgil had thanked and re-thanked Robbie, the guy who’d seen the fire, called 911, and come to help—he’d send him a couple cases of Leinie’s Summer Shandy at the first chance—he went back inside the house and kicked an unfortunate wastebasket. He was a knot of frustration, four o’clock in the morning and nobody he could really call, or anything he could effectively do.

But sleep was impossible. Eventually, figuring that if he was up, everybody else should be, too, he cleaned up, and at four-thirty in the morning, drove to the Holiday Inn and woke up Sewickey. Sewickey came to the door looking stunned, and Virgil sensed that it wasn’t an act. “We’re having a meeting at eight o’clock in in the back room at Custard’s. Be there.”

Sewickey, confused, looked around at the parking lot, and then up in the sky, and finally asked, “What the heck time is it?”

He got a similar reaction from Bauer, who was at the Downtown Inn. Yael, however, was awake and staring at the television, still jet-lagged.

“The stone is gone?”

“Meeting at eight o’clock,” he said.

“But why would I take the stone? I
had
the stone.”

“Eight o’clock,” Virgil said.

The Turks were gone, but he drove to Awad’s apartment and pounded on the door until Awad opened it. He was wearing what appeared to be black velvet pajamas and yet another stunned expression.

Virgil said, “Invite me in?”

Awad looked over his shoulder and said, in a loud voice, “Of course, you are the police.”

Virgil stepped inside, and saw a sheet and blanket crumpled on the floor next to the couch. He nodded at the bedroom door and raised an eyebrow, and Awad nodded.

Virgil stepped over to the bedroom door and knocked: “This is the state police. Please come out. Now.”

A voice from inside: “Why?”

“We’re having a conversation about the Solomon stone, and you need to be in it.”

The door opened and an elderly gray-bearded man edged out. He was wearing Jockey briefs that were way too long in the crotch, and a white V-necked T-shirt. “What have I done?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Now: the two of you. You’ve been under surveillance. I know you’re trying to buy the stone. You should know that I had the stone until earlier this evening, when my garage was firebombed and the stone was stolen while I was fighting the fire. So. We are having a meeting at eight o’clock at Custard’s Last Stand.”

And so on.

With some sense of righteous revenge—everybody was now awake and either frightened or worried—he headed back toward his house, but then thought,
Ma
.

Ellen and Ma had some kind of friendly relationship. Was it possible that Ma had stolen the stone? He continued past his house and out into the countryside, to Ma’s house, pulled into the driveway and pounded on the door until lights went on.

Ma came to the door, peeked past a curtain, then opened the door. She was holding a Remington autoloading shotgun. “Virgil?”

“At eight o’clock . . .”

—

B
Y THE TIME
he’d finished the rounds, it was almost six. He called Ellen again, and again got switched to the answering service—but the phone was ringing a half-dozen times before he was switched, so it wasn’t turned off. She was either not hearing the ring, or was ignoring it. He called her every half hour until he got to Custard’s at five minutes after eight, and never got an answer. Was she on the run?

—

C
USTARD
’
S BACK ROOM
was usually reserved for cardplayers, but they never started until ten, so it was clear at eight. The meeting got held up because Sewickey, who arrived early, had ordered pancakes and bacon, and then Awad showed up with his Hezbollah associate, whose name was Adabi al-Lubnani, who ordered pancakes but got French toast by mistake, but was impressed by the name, and so accepted it; and by the time Virgil got there, everybody was fussing over food, and who had the ketchup and was there more syrup, except Ma, who was hunched over Tag Bauer, big-eyed about his television show. And not only big-eyed, Virgil thought sourly, as he tracked Bauer’s eyes down to her cleavage.

He called the meeting to order by rapping on a water glass, and said, “This is gonna be short. I know you all want this stone, but as I keep telling everybody, if you buy it, you’ll be violating a large number of laws. Do all of you understand this? That you could go to prison? I’d like a show of hands by those who understand this.”

They all raised their hands.

Virgil said, “Further. For those with the money—I’m looking at you, Bauer, and you, Mr. al-Lubnani—there are some extremely suspicious circumstances involving the discovery of the stone, and its removal from Israel. If you wanted to bet me, I’d take either side of a fifty-fifty bet that the stone is a fake. Do you really want to spend, what, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for something that turns out to be a fake? I don’t think so.”

They all nodded into their pancakes, and al-Lubnani muttered something to Awad, who also nodded.

Virgil said, “You all know now that somebody firebombed my garage last night and stole the stone. I am beyond being pissed off. So I’m telling you: this is now personal, and you do not want to get in the way. Go home. I’m telling you: Go home. Everybody who understands that, raise your hand.”

They all raised their hands, and Sewickey yawned.

Virgil: “You’re yawning, Sewickey. You think I’m joking?”

“No, I don’t,” Sewickey said. “I’ll talk to you about it in private. About the yawn.”

Virgil looked at him for a moment, then said, “Right.” And to everybody else, “Go home. All of you. Go home.”

Then he turned and headed for the door, tipping his head, and said, “Sewickey.”

—

S
EWICKEY FOLLOWED HIM OUT
into the main dining room and Virgil said, “The yawn?”

Sewickey pointed at an empty booth, and they sat facing each other, and Sewickey interlaced his fingers on the tabletop and said, “Virgil, you’re a likable guy, and I don’t want to see you or anybody else get hurt, but you don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“What don’t I understand? There’s this precious artifact—”

“You don’t understand that the stone isn’t especially important. It’s the
idea
of the stone, and what everybody can squeeze out of it. Blood, already,” Sewickey said. “But the authenticity, the preciousness, the power? Nobody here really cares about that. Well, maybe this Israel archaeologist does, but the rest of us don’t.”

“I’ve read these, uh, books about the power these kinds of things can accumulate,” Virgil ventured.

“Virgil, Virgil. It’s all crap. It’s a fuckin’ rock. Some lunatic killer three thousand years ago wrote a note on it, and then he died and nobody gave a shit what he said. The stone was probably part of a fence or a foundation or something. Maybe a chopping block, and used when they cut the heads off pigeons.”

“Then, what—”

“It’s all about
us
. About me and Bauer and the Hezbollah and the Israelis. We aren’t going home. We can’t. We need this thing.”

“So you don’t even care about—”

“Virgil, listen. It’s all crazier than a bucket of drunk rattlesnakes, but we’ve all got our needs and they need to be tended to,” Sewickey said. “Bauer calls himself an investigative archaeologist, but you know what he majored in, in college?”

Virgil thought for a few seconds, then guessed, “Television?”

“Drama. He wants to be a movie star. But he
needs
this stone. All that bullshit about the planks from Noah’s Ark almost killed him off.
Nobody
believed him. That thing about getting the gopher wood at a Glendale gas station? That’s the truth of the matter.”