Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) (3 page)

“Perhaps your last chance to buy souvenirs,” he said. “I show something just for you.”

As he leaned into the van, I wondered how he knew we were on the final leg of our tour. Our bus driver or another passenger had probably mentioned it. Also I had a vague impression I had seen this face before. He appeared to be Arabic, but Jews and Arabs had descended from the same Semitic line. I had been trained to remember facial features, and memories of September 11 had kept me alert during our two weeks in the
Holy Land
. I watched as the souvenir seller held out a miniature Dead Sea Scroll jar, opened the lid and lifted up a paper scroll.

“Just like parchment . . . real Hebrew writing,” he said. “The one you get is all packed secure. Because I need to make haste home, everything is now bargain price.”

I shook my head. “No thanks.”

“Normally is twenty-five dollars. For you, only ten. Yes?”

“It’s bigger than those we saw before,” said Wilma Gannon. She studied the reddish clay jar. “And they cost that much or more.” Tall and lean like her husband, she had a grandmotherly swirl of white hair.

“What would I do with a Dead Sea Scroll jar?” I asked. It looked like a flower vase to me.

Jill grinned.

“You drive some hard bargain,” said the man, frowning. “Five dollars.”

“He’s not going to let you get away without buying it,” Jill said. I had given
her
a hard time a couple of days before about buying so many souvenirs. A lot of them had to be stuffed into my bag.

The man reached back into the van and pulled out a box a little larger than the clay jar. It was sealed tightly with clear plastic tape. “This one ready to pack in your bag. No way it can break. Only five dollars. Okay?”

I had to admire his persistence. And it did sound like a good deal.

The man held out the package. “Americans are good people,” he said. “I like you. Four dollars–my last offer.”

Jill whispered in my ear. “For God’s sake, buy it.”

I shrugged and pulled a money clip stuffed with dollar bills out of my pocket, peeled off four and handed them over. “You’re quite a salesman,” I said.

I don’t know why, but I had an odd feeling that I might have bought more than I had bargained for.

Chapter
2

Back on the bus, Jill leaned across to listen to a pixie-eyed woman who always had a joke to tell. I debated what to do with my new souvenir. I finally stuck the box in the webbed pocket of the seat in front of me, next to my water bottle. We had drunk the water in the hotels with no problem, but on the road I figured discretion was the watchword. I wasn’t interested in a visit from Montezuma’s circumcised cousin, Mordecai.

When Sam Gannon wandered up the aisle a few minutes later, he stopped to lean against my seat. “Wilma told me about the way you took that Dead Sea Scroll guy to the cleaners. I didn’t know you were such a haggler.”

“I’m not,” I said. “And I don’t know that I got the best of him. When you think about it, some Palestinian potter probably got no more than a buck for that jar. The piece of paper with some Hebrew scratching couldn’t have cost more than fifty cents, and the box maybe another buck. The guy still made a decent profit.”

As the bus began to push through the crowded streets of Tel Aviv, the sights quickly put salesman and souvenir out of mind. We passed
Ben-Gurion
Airport
with jets roaring overhead, then traveled through the stark, desolate Judean hills. Nothing grew there and certainly nothing could live there. It made you wonder why this was called the Promised Land.

We took a rest stop at an isolated service station with a small market. Our Palestinian driver refueled the bus and the rest of us picked over an assortment of drinks and snacks. I had some reservations about hanging around in isolated areas of
Israel
, but the tour company was owned by Arabs, and we had been told the Palestinians knew this and would give us no trouble. There had been car bombings during the past week, but so far no threats had come our way.

When we turned north again around
Jerusalem
, Jake Cohen jabbed his stick at a steady stream of sights, including the Arab town of
Bethany
just east of the
Holy
City
. As we whizzed past, he pointed out the supposed site of Lazarus’ tomb and the inevitable church connected with it. One thing that strikes you on a visit to the
Holy Land
, whenever you come across a spot believed to have been related to Jesus’ life or ministry, somebody has built a church on it.

“There’s another
Bethany
in
Jordan
,” Jake said, “not far from where you’ll cross over. It’s the place where John the Baptist did his baptizing, according to John one, verse twenty-eight. It was also around there that Joshua led the Israelites across the
Jordan River
into the Promised Land. Also,
Bethany
has a tel called Mar Elias, or Elijah’s Hill, where the prophet is said to have ascended to heaven in a whirlwind, riding a chariot of fire pulled by horses of fire.”

“That’s from Second Kings, chapter two,” said deep-voiced Arnold Demontbreun. He was our class biblical authority, but I sometimes wonder about him.
Arnold
can quote the Bible verse by verse but can’t remember his wife’s birthday.

“Are we going to stop there?” This from a small, white-haired woman on the front row named Martha something or other. She was from what we uncharitably called the Old Ladies Class.

“Sorry,” Sam Gannon said. “By the time we get through Israeli customs and immigration, cross the river and get checked out by the Jordanians, we’ll do well to reach
Amman
by dark.”

I popped another piece of gum and wondered if this might not turn out to be a three-stick bus ride.

We were soon passing through a barren, rocky section of Judean desert. There were several Bedouin camps nestled among the sand-colored hills. The small settlements back away from the highway were marked by long, rectangular tents. Some had wheeled water tanks, and in most the crafty Arabs had traded their “ships of the desert” for pickup trucks.

At the
Jordan River
border post we were herded off the bus. We were warned to bring everything with us, since we would be boarding a Jordanian coach as soon as we cleared immigration. I decided to give Jill the scroll box to put in her carryon since mine was bulging with camera equipment. Thanks to Jake Cohen we moved quickly through passport checks and visa slip returns. The Israelis were preoccupied with a large group of departing Palestinians, giving us Americans only a cursory look. I noticed the Arabs got a thorough checkout. One of the customs officers, a friend of Jake’s, told him they got frequent alerts about attempts to smuggle guns and bomb-making materials into the country. But a warning bulletin had them on the lookout for a Palestinian attempting to smuggle something out. He didn’t say what.

Back in the parking lot, we were instructed to identify each of our bags from the Israeli bus before they could be loaded onto the Jordanian coach. Such security precautions brought no objections as we recalled the explosions and bloody confrontations seen on the nightly news. And the sight of Israeli soldiers everywhere armed with rifles during our trip had served as a grim reminder of the uncertain conditions.

After a lengthy round of hugs and kisses and handshakes and good-byes, we left Jake and the
Land
of
Israel
, finally rolling across the
Allenby
Bridge
, named for the British general of World War I fame. On the other side it was called the
King
Hussein
Bridge
. As with the scrawny
Jordan River
, the bridge looked more like something from the
Tennessee
backwoods than an international border crossing.

In
Jordan
we sat on the bus while our guide collected passports and hustled them into the immigration office. He returned in the company of a stoop-shouldered man with shifty eyes and an unsmiling face. I had encountered enough of the type to know if he’d had on a badge it would have read
BUREAUCRAT
.

“Where is Mr. McKenzie?” the man called out.

Jill and I were seated near the front. I held up my hand. He strode over, stared at me, then focused on my open passport.

“You are Gregory McKenzie?”

“That’s right,” I said, wondering what I had done to merit such distinction.

He suddenly gave me an improbable smile. “Welcome to Jordan, Mr. McKenzie,” he said. “Enjoy your visit.”

Our guide was a young Jordanian with a confident air. In textbook English he assured us this was only a routine spot check.

I was not so certain.

Chapter
3

At our hotel in
Amman
that evening, we sat with the Gannons, enjoyed a buffet and talked about our trip. The dining room was impressive, decorated with wine-red draperies. The napkins matched the drapes and the tables were set with fine china and spread with enough silverware to handle a family reunion. I called it “sheik chic.” Exotic aromas rose from the buffet.

“What impressed you most about the trip, Jill?” Sam asked. He was about to dig into a plate of salad greens and veggies, but he waited thoughtfully for her answer.

“There was so much it’s hard to single out one thing. I guess I’d have to say the places in
Jerusalem
where Jesus once walked. Like the
Garden
of
Gethsemane
and the Holy Sepulcher.”

“What about
Galilee
?” Wilma asked.

Jill smiled. “Like I said, it’s hard to choose between them.”

I decided to offer my two shekels’ worth. “I was most impressed by the big restorations,” I said. “Places like
Masada
and
Caesarea
and Meggido.”

“Why those?” Sam held out his coffee cup for the waiter.

“I took a year of archaeology as an elective in college.”

“That why you bought the Dead Sea Scroll thing?”

“Jill pressured me on that.”

She squinched her nose. “Okay, blame me. I just didn’t have the heart to wait for him to get down on his knees.”

Sam laughed. “A real salesman, huh?”

“He was dogged.” I pushed my chair back, knowing I had reached my salad limit. “Anybody ready for the real thing?”

We trooped over to the main buffet, which was loaded with all kinds of hot and cold dishes. A lot of them defied identification. But one thing I knew for certain–we would find olives. We had come to expect them at every meal, morning,
noon
or night. Early on I had observed that the
Holy Land
was composed of two things, rocks and olive trees. Both were everywhere. And
Jordan
was no exception. I proceeded to load up my plate.

Back in our seats, Wilma said, “We certainly can’t complain about the way we’ve been fed over here.”

I eyed the food piled high on Sam’s plate. “The way you eat, man, I don’t see how the devil you stay so trim.”

He shrugged. “It’s the long legs. I guess they’re just an extension of my stomach.”

“I think all the walking on this trip, all the climbing up and down steps, has helped slim Greg down a bit,” Jill said. “Looks like he might soon get rid of that hangover.”

That’s what she called my belly hanging over my belt.

“Glad to hear that,” Sam said. “You
were
getting a bit on the hefty side, chum. But I understand. You’ve had a few bad months.”

“That’s an understatement. Hopefully it’s all behind me now.”

It was a rather lame hope.

The binge eating was part of my reaction to the trouble I had been suffering through, and quitting smoking hadn’t helped. Gorging was self-destructive, of course. I had worked hard at getting myself back on a sensible path. Still, the pain remained. It came from being tossed out of a job I enjoyed. It came from being accused of things that were untrue. And it came from harassment that was merciless.

After my retirement from the Air Force in the mid-nineties, Jill and I had bought an RV and set out to bum our way around the country, seeing all the sights we had missed during my
two-and-a-half
decades in the military. We wintered in
California
, then summered through
Idaho
,
Montana
and the
Dakotas
. When the weather turned coolish again, we headed for
Florida
. Wanderlust took us to
Mexico
, where we joined a jacaranda-scented enclave of the American military retirement community around
Guadalajara
. But Jill soon began to long for a return to her
Tennessee
roots. So we came to
Nashville
, bought a house and settled in.