Free Virgin by Mary Elizabeth Murphy Page A

and that money
was no object.
    Perhaps his
feelers hadn't been subtle enough. Perhaps the seller he sought preferred more
tried-and-true channels of commerce. Whatever the reason, he was offered many
items but none were what he sought.
    Then, just last
year, his feelers caught ripples of excitement from the manuscript department
at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. A unique first-century scroll had been
brought in for verification. As he homed in on the scent, word came that the
scroll turned out to be a fake. So he'd veered off and continued his search
elsewhere.
    And then, just
last month, whispers of another fake, identical to the first--the same
disjointed story, written in the same Aramaic form of Hebrew, on an ancient
parchment.
    Something in
those whispers teased Kesev. The scant details he could glean about the fakes
tantalized him. He investigated and learned that the first scroll had been
brought in by an American who had since returned home. But the second . . . a
wealthy woman from a Tel Aviv suburb had brought that in, and taken it home in
a huff when informed that she'd been duped.
    Kesev was
standing in her living room now.
    He heard her
footsteps behind him.
    "Here, Mr.
Kesev," said a throaty voice behind him. Her Ivrit carried a barely
noticeable Eastern European accent. "I believe this is what you
want."
    He turned
slowly, hiding his anticipation. Tulla Szobel was in her mid-fifties, blond
hair, reed thin, prematurely wrinkled, and dressed in a beige knit dress the
color of her walls. A cigarette dangled from her lips. She held a Lucite case
between her hands.
    Kesev took the
case from her and carried it to the glass-and-chrome coffee table. Without
asking permission, he lifted the lid and removed the scroll.
    "Careful!"
she said, hovering over him.
    He ignored her.
He uncoiled a foot or so of the scroll and began reading--
    Then stopped.
This wasn't the scroll. This looked like the scroll,
and some of it read like the scroll, but the writing, the penmanship was all
wrong.
    "They were
right," he said, nodding slowly. "This is a fake. A clumsy
fake."
    Miss Szobel
sniffed. "I don't need you to tell me that. The Rockefeller Museum--"
    "Where did
you get this?" Kesev said, rerolling the scroll.
    She puffed
furiously on her cigarette. "Why. . . I . . .picked it up in a street
bazaar."
    "Really?"
They all said that. Amazing. Israel seemed full of lucky collectors who were
forever happening on priceless--or potentially priceless--artifacts in street
stalls, and purchasing them for next to nothing from vendors who had no idea of
their true worth. "You must take me to him."
    "I wish I could," she said. "I've been looking for
him myself, trying to get my money back. But he seems to have vanished into
thin air."
    "You are
lying," Kesev said evenly, replacing the Lucite lid and looking up at her.
    She stepped
back as if he'd spit at her. "How dare you!" She pointed a shaking
finger toward her front door. "I want you out of--"
    "If I
leave without the name that I seek I will return within the hour with a search
warrant and a search team, and we will comb this house inch by inch until we
turn up more forgeries from this mysterious source."
    Kesev couldn't
back up a word of that threat, but he knew the specter of a search of the
premises would strike terror into the heart of any serious antiquities
collector. There wasn't one who didn't dip into the black market now and then.
Some bought there almost exclusively. If Miss Szobel followed true to form, a
search might result in the seizure of half her collection; maybe more.
    Miss Szobel's
pointing arm faltered and fell to her side.
    "Wh-why?
On what grounds? Why does Domestic Intelligence care--?"
    "Oh, it's
not just the Shin Bet. The Mossad is involved too."
    She paled
further. "The Mossad?"
    "Yes. We
have reason to believe that these scrolls are merely the latest in an ongoing
scheme to sell worthless fakes to wealthy collectors and funnel the money to
Hamas and other