“Tell me, Doctor,” I said, “how did you determine that the bones belonged to Henry Bryson? I don’t think they wore dog tags or carried driver’s licenses two thousand years ago.”
Lavon reached into a gym bag and pulled out a clear plastic cylinder, resembling the ones used by banks at their drive-in windows. He tossed it over to me. Inside, fixed in place with bubble wrap, were the distinct bones of a human finger, held together by a metal pin.
“We traced the serial number on the pin to the hospital, which connected us to a surgeon’s office, which ultimately linked us with Juliet here.”
“He enjoyed woodworking and accidentally sliced his finger off with a band saw several years before you first met him,” she said. “Some fine surgeons over at Mass General sewed it back on and eventually he made a full recovery. He didn’t even notice it after a while. It was almost as if the accident never happened.”
I reached into my jacket pocket and took out my reading glasses, better to focus on the pin. As a veteran of the Army special forces, I was all too familiar with bone fractures and this particular medical technology.
“You dated the specific bone, around the pin?”
“You have the printouts right there,” said Lavon. “We’ll make a copy for you, if you wish, for later study. Take all the time you need.”
“DNA?”
“None recoverable from this specimen.”
I rolled it around a couple of times. “This pin wasn’t simply drilled in later?”
“That was our first thought, too,” he replied: “somebody was playing a trick on us. It happens all the time in our line of work. That’s why we confirmed the results with completely independent labs. I hand carried each of the specimens as well, to ensure the integrity of the chain of custody.”
I glanced back down at the cylinder.
Now I’ve heard some whoppers in my day, and in my business, I had to deal all too often with people who were, as Twain famously put it, “economical with the truth.”
On the other hand, Juliet Bryson had not tossed them out straightaway, which is what I would have done to anyone spinning such a tale, unless …
“Dr. Lavon, you mentioned bones, plural. I presume you recovered the rest of the skeleton.”
He nodded. “This fragment and our small test samples were the only portions the Israeli authorities would allow us to take out of the country.”
“Where are the other bones now?”
“At the lab, in Tel Aviv. I can show you, if you’d like to see them.”
***
I assessed both visitors closely once more. Truly pathological liars often have the innate ability to inspire confidence, which is why certain types of investment swindles remain so consistent over time.
But if the Brysons’ work, and fortune, had in fact remained unpublicized, I couldn’t figure out what these two could have hoped to gain from their story.
“Yes,” I replied, “I would like to see the bones. Actually, I’d like to go through the entire sequence of events that led you here, starting from the very top.”
“Certainly,” he said.
I held up the tube. “I can’t exactly go back to my client and present this as definitive proof of Dr. Bryson’s whereabouts.”
Chapter 6
That was how I found myself on the next El Al flight out of New York. Markowitz couldn’t go; he had a social commitment he couldn’t avoid without the gossip columnists taking note, but he did agree to give his father only a basic outline of our findings until we had a chance to make further inquiry.
Sharon, too, chose to stay behind, for reasons she didn’t elaborate.
While we waited for our flight to board, Lavon explained that her father, a Dallas real estate developer, had provided the lion’s share of their excavation’s funding for the past several years.
He wasn’t just any developer, either. According to the Wall Street Journal, Edward Bergfeld, Jr. owned the second largest collection of Class A office buildings in the United States, and it came as no surprise to hear that he also ranked among the top contributors to conservative religious and political causes.
“Do you have a sense of Sharon’s own views?” I asked.
Lavon paused to consider the question.
“Somewhat like her father’s, from what I can tell,” he replied, “but I’ve learned not to probe. In our business, we take funding where we can find it. The old man seems satisfied with our current arrangement and I don’t want to jeopardize our work by getting into unnecessary theological disputes.”
I nodded. This made perfect sense.
“How much time has she spent at the site?” I asked.
“She visited for the first time earlier this year.”
“Does she have any archaeological training?”
“No. She just happened to be there when we uncovered the skeleton; but I’ll give credit where it’s due: She was the one who initially noticed the polyester core in the thread. The brand is called D-Core; it’s quite common today.”
Since others waiting at the departure gate could overhear our conversation, we agreed not to discuss further specifics until we reached our destination, though I couldn’t resist making a final pass through online databases before having to shut the system down for takeoff.
***
Considering that I had made my last trip to Israel in the back of a noisy, windowless C-130, I couldn’t complain too much about having to fly coach. We landed about six the next morning, cleared immigration and customs, and were comfortably ensconced in our rental car by eight, crawling slowly forward in Tel Aviv’s rush-hour traffic.
Half an hour later, we pulled into the parking lot of Radiometric Labs and greeted the friendly receptionist. She escorted us to the back, where two technicians had laid out the skeleton on a metal table in the center of the room.
“I called ahead,” said Lavon.
We introduced ourselves. Radiometric’s manager, Jonathan Dichter, had studied with Lavon at Michigan before returning to his native country.
The lab was arranged in a typical fashion. A long bench ran the entire length of one side, covered with an array of beakers and reagents, an autoclave and couple of laptop PCs — though I suppose I should qualify the term “typical.” Old movie posters of Godzilla breathing fire upon Japanese cities festooned the walls.
“Two thousand years from now, confused scientists might attribute the destruction of our present world to such a cause,” Dichter explained.
I shrugged. To each his own.
We chatted a few more minutes and then got down to business.
“When did you first realize you had a problem?” I asked.
“Let me start by explaining our normal procedures,” Dichter replied.
“When a skeleton comes in from an excavation site, we lay it out on the table and count the bones, to determine whether it is completely intact and to resolve the question of whether two or more sets of bones may have been mixed together.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Then we take preliminary measurements of the long bones and x-ray everything.”
“That would have picked up the pin, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s correct, if our equipment had been working. Our machine broke down a few days earlier, but the local hospital had priority access to the parts we needed. Getting it repaired took over a week.”
“That’s when you found the pin?”
“Yes, but by then that was only one of many anomalies,” said Lavon.
Dichter continued, “From the femur length, we estimated the man’s height at 185 centimeters. That’s six foot one to you Americans; tall for the era, but not Goliath.”
From my recollection of Henry Bryson, that sounded about right.
“Once we did that,” Dichter said, “we took random samples of the bones and calculated a preliminary age using a standard radiocarbon process. In this case, the results dated consistently to the first century, with a margin of error plus or minus a decade or two.”