The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone

by Tony Abbott

  . . . final rest . . . soul’s long journey . . .

  No, no. Please don’t go there. Blinking her eyelashes apart she gazed beyond the tilted sundial to a tomb with a broken column sticking up from it. Next to that leaned a stone with a weeping angel sitting on top. Loss and grief no matter where she looked . . .

  A man appeared at the edge of the wooded path to their left. He walked slowly toward the mourners, then stopped midway, his eyes moving over her and the Kaplans.

  Becca turned to see Lily still filming. “That guy over there stopped coming when he saw your camera.”

  Darrell stepped back to them. “You saw that, too? Here come his friends.”

  Two other men joined the first. One was a heavyset man with a chiseled face, wearing a slick black suit. The other was pale, smaller, and hunched over like a bent wire. The pale man spoke to the other two, who both stepped behind a tomb at the same time, as if they were connected.

  Becca watched the pale man pick his way carefully over the wet grass to the gravesite and stand close-by. His hands were folded, his head down. During a pause in the priest’s words, the man raised his eyes to Becca, then to Roald and Wade, then lowered his face. She felt a weird tingle crawl up her back, as if in that instant he had looked directly through her. His glasses were thick and his posture twisted, although he was not an old man. His left temple bore a nasty V-shaped bruise, stippled with dots. It looked recent.

  “Amen . . .”

  The priest dribbled holy water on the casket from a small silver vessel, murmured a final blessing, and it was over. The sky seemed to darken at the same moment. The chill rain came down harder.

  The crowd dispersed quickly, some to cars, others on foot on the paths and sidewalks toward the exits. Several people hailed taxis on the street. Soon the cemetery was empty except for them, the workers, and the three men by the weeping angel, still eyeing them.

  She stepped toward Wade and his father. “Uncle Roald, those guys are watching us.” By the time Roald lifted his head, slid his glasses back on, and turned to look, the men had gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  To get out of the rain, Darrell squirrelled himself under the broad lintel of a haunted mausoleum next to the others who, he guessed, were silent because they were wondering what to do next. He was pretty sure what they should do next.

  “Ever since we had that bizarro conversation with Uncle Henry’s housekeeper on the phone, I keep thinking she’s got to know something.”

  “We’ll go to the apartment,” Dr. Kaplan said. “But we’re checking into a hotel first. We rushed to get here on time, but we can slow down now. We’ll clean up, then head over to his place.”

  “Which brings me to my next point. There’s got to be a restaurant in this city, right?” Darrell added. “Germans make good food. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’ll eat whatever. Did anyone like the food on the airplane? Let me rephrase that. Did anyone eat the food on the airplane—”

  “Darrell, you’re doing it again,” said Lily.

  He stopped talking, but his brain kept going. I ate it, but it wasn’t good and it wasn’t enough. No one else is hungry? I’m hungry. . . .

  “Why wasn’t Frau Munch here, Dad?” Wade asked. “It’s strange, isn’t it? She answered his phone. Maybe she even lives there, or at least in his building.”

  “Everything’s strange,” Darrell said. “It’s Europe.”

  Roald turned to face the exit, looking as if he were holding his breath to keep himself together. “I’m sure she’ll tell us something that will just put an end to the mystery. First, a hotel. Let’s go.”

  Darrell partly agreed with his stepfather—she’ll tell us something—but he wasn’t sure that the mystery would end soon. It probably wouldn’t. A coded email from a friend who was suddenly dead had to mean something in the spy capital of the world. Of course it did.

  Thanks to Lily’s online searching, they found an inexpensive hotel and checked into two rooms, one for Lily and Becca, one for the boys and their father. Darrell wanted to drop his junk off and get right back out on the street—Strasse, Becca told him—but sitting on the bed was a mistake. He could almost hear it screaming at him to lie down on it. He sank into the soft mattress, hoping it was as bug-free as it appeared. By the time his eyes opened, it was already midafternoon and everyone else was waking up too.

  Lunch in the hotel dining room was something drowned in heavy sauce, but there was a lot of it, so that was good. When they stepped onto the busy Strasse, it was nearing dinnertime, the restaurants were lighting up, and he was feeling hungry again, though apparently no one else was.

  They found a cab to Uncle Henry’s, and at twenty minutes to five they pulled to a stop in front of squat, faceless building on a broad, divided avenue called Unter den Linden.

  Roald glanced into his student notebook, checked the building number, and closed the book. “This is it.” He paid the driver and they climbed out. A string of sirens two or three blocks away went eee-ooo-eee-ooo, like in the movies. Police? Fire trucks? Spies?

  No, spies don’t use sirens.

  A woman bundled against the cold murmured something as she stole quickly around them and up the street. Was she a spy? Or just cold. He could see his breath and started stamping his feet.

  “Heinrich lived on the third floor,” Roald said, stepping up to a wide door set between a pair of waist-high planters with evergreen bushes in them. He pressed the bell. It rang faintly inside. No answer. He rang again. Again, no answer.

  “Now what?” asked Lily. “Should we wait for someone to go in and tag along?”

  “Or force our way in,” Darrell added. “Wade, you and me—”

  “You and me what?”

  “Hold your horses,” Roald said. He knelt down and reached behind the planter to the left of the door, slid his fingers up the side, and stopped halfway. When he drew back, he was holding a key ring with two keys.

  “Cool!” said Wade. “Hidden in plain sight. How did you know?”

  “Heinrich always left extra keys for late-arriving students.”

  “Like you?” asked Becca.

  “Oh yes. We used to talk long into the night. All of us.”

  Using one key for the outside door, they entered a deserted lobby barely illuminated by a small ceiling fixture.

  “European electricity,” Darrell breathed. “From the Dark Ages.”

  Lily chuckled. “As long as it charges our phones.”

  They climbed two flights of narrow stairs. The steps creaked, and it was nearly as cold in the stairwell as it was outside, but the building was otherwise quiet. They stopped at apartment 32. Roald raised his hand to knock on the door, then murmured that the apartment was empty. He unlocked it instead, and they entered.

  “Hello?” Wade said quietly. “Anyone?”

  No sound. The rooms were dark and without heat. Lily found the nearest light switch, and a table lamp came on. The living room looked neat and orderly, as if it had just been cleaned, except for one extremely dusty table by the street window. Becca picked up a silver pitch pipe from it. “Was Heinrich Vogel in a barbershop quartet?”

  “No. A modern music group,” Dr. Kaplan said. “But then, maybe I didn’t know him all that well—”

  Clack. Thump. Clack. Thump.

  Darrell’s heart flew into his throat. “Someone’s coming up the stairs!”

  Before they could move, the door swung open, and an elderly woman with thin gray hair leaned into the room. She scanned the space from wall to wall as if she didn’t see any of them.

  “Wer ist da?”

  Everyone looked at Becca. “She asked who we are.”

  “We’re friends of Heinrich,” Darrell’s stepfather said, coming forward with his hand outstretched. “I was his student a long time ago, Roald Kaplan.”

  “Ah, ah,” the woman said, not taking his hand. “I speak at you on ze telephoon. Amerikaner. I am Frau Munch.”

  She hobbled into the room and
settled herself familiarly in an overstuffed chair. She raised her head and blinked for some time before speaking. “I see not well. Zis is why I no go to funeral. Zere are sree of you?”

  Darrell held up a hand with all his fingers outstretched, which she did not look at. “Um . . . five,” he said.

  “Fife! Ah. Zo. You have question marks?”

  “Yes,” said Wade, glowering at Darrell’s hand, which was still in the air. “Can you tell us how Dr. Vogel died?”

  “Wade, perhaps . . . ,” his father said.

  “No, no. Is fine,” Frau Munch said, drawing her eyebrows together in a fierce scowl. “I vas not working two night ago. He vas alone and must have gone out. Ze Polizei discovered him on ze Strasse behint ze buildink. He vas joked.”

  “Joked?” said Lily.

  “Ja!” Frau Munch wrapped her hands around her neck. “Kkkk! Joked!”

  “Choked,” Lily said softly. Her face was white. So was Becca’s.

  Wade seemed to be teetering on his feet. “Do you mean he was . . .” He swung around. “Dad . . . Uncle Henry was . . . ?”

  “Are you saying he was murdered?” Dr. Kaplan asked.

  Darrell felt suddenly weak. He slumped into the chair by the window next to the dusty table with the pitch pipe on it.

  “Ze Polizei are searching for his killer. Zey believe it is a rubbery gone rong and zat ze killer iz a seef.”

  Darrell wondered for a second if Frau Munch was using Uncle Henry’s code to talk. “Excuse me? A . . . seef?”

  “Ja. You know. Seef. Rubber. Burk-a-ler!”

  The words stuttered in his mind, until he finally understood. “Thief, robber, burglar!” he said.

  “Zat iz vut I set. Und, like I set, I klean apartment sree times week. I vas not here two night ago ven he died.”

  Lily nudged Darrell and whispered in his ear. “For a lady who can’t see too well, she sure keeps the place spotless.”

  It was true. Except for the extremely dusty table next to his chair, the place was immaculate. He peeked under the furniture to see if she vacuumed as well as she dusted.

  “Is there anything more you can tell us?” asked Lily.

  “No,” Frau Munch said. “I em done. You go now.”

  Dr. Kaplan rose haltingly to his feet, though the old lady didn’t. “Well, thank you. Herr Vogel was a dear old friend. I was one of the group of students he called Asterias—”

  All at once, Frau Munch stiffened in her chair. “Asterias? Asterias! Ja, ja!”

  She rose awkwardly from the chair and limped directly toward Darrell, though she didn’t appear to see him. She stood squarely in front of the dusty table by his chair, raised a thin hand, and with her fingernail began to spell out words in the dust. It took minutes, as she carefully formed each letter. When she was done, she spun around, holding the pitch pipe in her hand. “Who is moosical here?”

  Everyone looked at Darrell. He raised his hand.

  No response. She couldn’t see him.

  Finally he said, “Uh . . . I’m musical. I play the guitar—”

  “Zo!” Frau Munch pressed the pitch pipe into Darrell’s hand, and breathed out a long breath. “Now, I hef told you vut Heinrich asked me to memorize. I leaf ze rest to you now.”

  She made her way to the door and down the stairs.

  Clack. Thump. Clack. Thump.

  They all stared at the dust marks on the table, except Darrell. Something glinted on the floor under the desk, and he got on all fours to examine it. “It looks like Frau Munch doesn’t vacuum as well as she dusts. Dad, did Uncle Henry have a starfish paperweight?”

  Roald nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes. He said it was what gave him the idea to call us that.”

  Darrell delicately tugged a V-shaped shard of glass from under the desk. “This looks like one arm of a starfish. It’s sticky with something red.”

  Becca stared at the fragment of glass. “One of the guys at the funeral had a bruise on his forehead that kind of matches that shape. Did anybody else notice that? It was all red and swollen.”

  “I saw it too,” said Wade, studying the piece of glass. “It was nasty, as if he’d been bashed with something. Dad, is this . . . this isn’t blood, is it?”

  Dr. Kaplan examined it under the lamp. “It could be . . .”

  “Oh . . .” Darrell wiped his fingers on his pants.

  “Hold on, now. Blood?” Lily moved closer to Becca. “What exactly are we saying here?”

  Wade took the shard back from his father. He held it gingerly between his fingers and looked at Darrell. “I guess we’re saying that maybe Uncle Henry slammed that guy with this paperweight and that’s how it broke.”

  He seemed to be searching for more words when Roald let out a long breath, shaking his head slowly.

  Scanning the darkening room as if looking for another clue, he said, “If . . . if this paperweight has blood on it, and if the blood belongs to the man at the cemetery, it means that the police are wrong. Uncle Henry wasn’t killed on the street. It may mean that the man at the cemetery killed Uncle Henry. And he may have done it right here.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wade stared at the bloody glass and his head buzzed.

  Murder. In this room.

  “If this was not a robbery . . .”

  “If this was not a robbery . . .” Dr. Kaplan swung around to Lily. “Bernard Dufort’s fall in the elevator in Paris. Are the police still saying it’s an accident? Can you look it up? Becca, can you translate?”

  “Instantly,” Lily said, tapping her tablet. Becca stood next to her.

  Wade leaned over the dusty table at an angle. The first line was in Greek, not a single word of which he understood, but he knew what it looked like from his astronomy books.

  This was followed by two lines in code.

  Lca Ayulc himab ds lca Cyzb ir Gzjrauhyss

  Rixxio lca nsihis, rixxio lca wxyea

  He recognized the first word of the coded part as The. “Dad, Becca,” he said, digging in his backpack for the celestial map. “Do either of you know any Greek?”

  She shook her head. “Baklava and spanakopita. That’s all.”

  Roald snapped to attention. “I only know one line of Greek. Heinrich taught it to me. To all of us in the group. It was a famous quote from . . . wait . . .”

  He pulled out his student notebook and went directly to the end. He read the words on the table. “I can’t believe it . . . or maybe I can. This is it. I wrote the quote in here. Heinrich began his semester lectures with it. It means, ‘Let no one untrained in geometry enter here.’ But it’s also . . .” He closed his eyes. “I’ll remember it in a minute—”

  Becca looked up from Lily’s tablet, her face pale. “Paris police no longer think Bernard Dufort’s death was an accident. There was a fire in his apartment in Paris, and the elevator cables at the newspaper office may have been tampered with.”

  Wade felt his breath leave him. Uncle Henry was murdered in this room. Maybe the man at the cemetery did it. And now, a second murder? “Dad, we should talk to the police. The paperweight is evidence they don’t know about. It’ll help them catch the killer—”

  The traffic grew suddenly chaotic on the street below. Horns blared. There was shouting, a screech of tires. Becca went to the window. Wade peeked out through the curtains next to her. A long black limousine had stopped awkwardly in front of the building and traffic was backing up behind them. Four men emerged from the back.

  “The guy with the bruise!” said Becca. “We need to get out!”

  “Someone memorize the message,” said Darrell.

  “I have a better idea,” said Lily. She stood over the table and snapped a picture with her phone. “Now let’s go!”

  “Hurry!” Dr. Kaplan tugged Lily and Darrell to the door.

  Everyone dashed out of the room except Wade. He took one last look at the writing on the table, then ran his sleeve across the top. Frau Munch’s coded message, whatever it meant, existed now
only as a photo on Lily’s cell phone.

  “Get over here!” Becca hissed from the top of the stairs.

  He jumped down the steps after her and found Frau Munch standing guard in the lobby and pointing to the back door as if she could see it. The front door thudded. It burst open. Wade flattened against the wall and watched several thick-necked men push across the tiny lobby and straight up the stairs.

  Did they follow us from the cemetery—

  Becca pulled him roughly out the back door and into the alley. The sun was setting, and the cold night air closed in. She hurried him into a long passage of black brick. He stole a look over his shoulder. No one yet. They came out a block behind Unter den Linden. Taking a quick right, Dr. Kaplan hustled them into a crowd of young people bubbling with conversation. They mingled as far as the next street, then turned at the corner of an avenue of high-end shops, Charlottenstrasse, where Lily made a noise that sounded like a squeal.

  “Are you all right?” asked Darrell.

  “Just . . . the . . . shops . . .”

  A sudden series of screeching tires made them jump, and they ducked under the arched opening of a restaurant. Dr. Kaplan froze when he looked inside at the tables.

  “Dad, what do you see? Dad!” said Wade. “Is someone—”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that . . .” He scanned the streets in every direction. “A lot has changed, but I think the Blue Star is not too far from here, if it still exists. I need time to sit and figure this whole thing out—”

  A motorcycle raced down the street, zigzagging among the pedestrians. The kids turned their faces toward the windows.

  “It’s still there, I found it!” said Lily, holding up her tablet. Roald nodded at the picture. “We can walk to the Blue Star in about half an hour. Down Charlottenstrasse . . . a right, two short lefts, straight . . .”

  Pulling themselves together, the kids and Dr. Kaplan made their way from street to street. It was nearing 6 p.m., and Berlin’s early nightlife was already a glittering mass of crowds and smoke and music and traffic.