The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  THE TAVERNIER STONES

  Praise for Stephen Parrish’s Tavernier Stones

  “From the opening pages to the closing scene, Stephen Parrish has created a literary mystery, one with adventure, history, cartography, jewels, and unforgettable characters. I was swept away. But even more, I can’t recall the last time that I finished a mystery that also moved me so much. The characters will stay with readers long after they stay up all night finishing this story.”

  —Erica Orloff, author of Freudian Slip and The Roofer

  “An utterly compelling adventure that pulls you along on a rollicking ride and doesn’t let go until you turn the last page. The writing just sparkles.”

  —Patricia Wood, author of Lottery

  “Relentlessly fascinating, Stephen Parrish’s Tavernier Stones is reminiscent of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol, but this treasure hunt based on real historical figures involves ancient maps, complex codes, and a cache of mysterious lost gems. It’s one hell of a good time.”

  —Mark Terry, author of The Fallen

  “The Tavernier Stones has something for every reader: adventure, intrigue, information, and no small amount of wit. An exciting debut from a talented new author, this novel delivers the goods.”

  —Debra Ginsberg, author of Blind Submission and The Grift

  “The Tavernier Stones is a sparkling, multi-faceted gem of a fast-paced thriller.”

  —Eric Stone, author of the Ray Sharp series of detective thrillers

  The Tavernier Stones: A Novel © 2010 by Stephen Parrish. All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © May 2010

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-2579-6

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover credits: Paris stamp: © iStockphoto.com/Marisa Allegra Williams; ruby: © iStockphoto.com/Bryan Reese; India stamp: © iStockphoto.com/Ray Roper; East German stamp: © iStockphoto.com/Linda Steward; ancient world map: © iStockphoto.com/Graffizone

  Midnight Ink, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Midnight Ink

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  For Sarah, who believed unconditionally in her father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Kevin Aicher. Paul Baumann. Valerie Beguin. Every cartographer who has ever lived. Terra Clarke. Dave, Doug, and Dan. Betsy Dornbusch. Brian Farrey. The Gemological Institute of America. William Greenleaf. The former Gross Diamond Centers of Louisville, Kentucky. Sarah Hina. The University of Illinois Department of Geography. Mel Johnson. Kay Jewelers of Champaign, Illinois. Librarians everywhere, thank God for you. The University of Louisville Department of Geography. Dave Mull. Erica Orloff. Pat, John, Dave, and Joe. Patsy Parrish. Sarah Parrish. The former R. R. Donnelley Cartographic Services in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Ann Schein. Herwig Schutzler. Miss Snark. Heike Specht. Susie Stivers. Dave Stong. Alicia Tártalo. Teachers should be paid like doctors. Mark Terry. Becky Zins.

  Pity the scrybe whose yearn for splendour

  Tempteth him to quit his hearth and home

  For all Earths treasure be but tinsell

  And beyond his realm do dragones roame

  —JOHANNES CELLARIUS, 1689

  ONE

  “THERE’S A DEAD GUY out there.”

  Kommissar Gerd Pfeffer first heard it from the dispatcher, who was quoting the boys who had found the body. He repeated the phrase in his mind as he drove to the scene: There’s a dead guy out there. It would make an appropriate epitaph, he thought. There had been lots of dead guys out there. There would be lots more.

  A narrow, overgrown road led Pfeffer into the Holmmoor, a bog north of Hamburg. Thickets on either side of the road strummed his car in irritating chords. Not far ahead, a gallery of rubberneckers, some with binoculars, peered into the woods. The focus of their attention was half a dozen police officers huddled like marooned buccaneers under a tarpaulin they had erected on an island of stable ground.

  Pfeffer parked his car on the road, because the rains had turned the berm into a purgatory of mud-choked grass. The rest of the trip would be on foot, and cautiously: he was crossing from the real world into the bog.

  It was one of the oddest calls he had received during his career as a homicide detective. Two boys had spent the weekend camping in the bog, on a patch of ground that had not yet thawed. Their campfire thawed it, and combined with the heavy downpours of late, as well as the strange temperature fluctuations of a typical Hamburg spring, up the body came.

  First, the boys said, the peat began to crack. A fissure radiated slowly outward from the center of the fire, rending the mossy soil along a zigzag path as though etched by a lightning bolt.

  Fingers emerged from the crack. The boys saw only their black tips and thought they were knobby roots, or maybe pieces of glacial till.

  The tips grew into appendages. The appendages joined in a palm. When a thumb finally appeared, the boys extrapolated what lay beneath.

  They laughed; it couldn’t be happening. They rolled on the ground laughing. Their sides ached and their eyes filled with tears, it was so funny. Then the realization sank in that
here indeed was a human hand, and following it now was an arm. And soon to come, no doubt, was the rest, some of which—the head in particular—might be too gruesome to behold.

  They ran, stumbling on rubbery legs, their young minds filled with images of a root-hairy dead man loping after them. By the time the police arrived, the arm had finished sprouting. It jutted straight into the air, flecked with peat, its fingers splayed widely like the comic image of a drowning man counting to five. The police immediately concluded the body was one of the so-called bog people, dozens of whom—some more than two thousand years old—had sprung out of the ground throughout that part of Germany.

  Pfeffer stepped from one clump of grass to another, advancing toward the tarpaulin. Walking on the peat gave him the sensation of unsurefootedness, as though he might sink up to his neck on any step. He did sink—four inches here, eight inches there, nothing there—you never knew. The water, stained by the peat, was the color of strongly brewed tea.

  The bogs around Hamburg had been disgorging Iron Age corpses for as long as Pfeffer could remember. Humic acids in the peat acted as embalming fluids that stained hair and beards red and tanned skin black. Bones decalcified, turning the corpses into leathery bags filled loosely with internal organs and a menu of last suppers, typically barley and linseed gruel. Most strikingly, features were so well preserved that except for the tanning, a modern-day public could see exactly what the victims looked like—could stare them in the face.

  They died with quiet dignity or cringing in horror. And the resignation or anguish or shock their expressions communicated at the moment of death, when the executioner weighted them down in watery graves, was preserved for the millennia.

  As Pfeffer reached the tarpaulin, the rain started up again. A young Polizist emerged from under the tarp, covering his head with a clipboard. He greeted Pfeffer with a firm handshake, then led him safely around shaking pools of stained water. The other officers remained under cover. They stared in fascination at a lump of soggy human remains.

  The victim—for so they were calling the thing—lay on his right side with his right arm stretched out straight above his head and his left arm pressed close to his side. He resembled other bog people in that his skin had darkened to the value of burnt umber and his woolly hair and prickly beard were the color of rust. And it was clear he had been murdered or sacrificed: deep, angular stab wounds perforated his chest and abdomen.

  But Pfeffer noticed that his garb was more modern than that of other bog people, who typically wore only sleeveless capes, probably because the linen used for the rest of their outfits couldn’t survive the peat acids. He estimated the victim’s clothing was from the Middle Ages or some other time long ago, but clearly not the twenty-first century: he wore breeches that stopped just below the knee, stockings over his calves, and broad metal buckles on his shoes.

  So it wasn’t an ancient pagan sacrifice after all. Nor was it a recent murder.

  An oval signet ring encircled the victim’s right middle finger, on the hand that had sprung up on the boys. Bezel-set in the oval mount was a dark stone slab. Pfeffer used his thumbnail to scrape the ring clean of peat. Carved in the slab were the initials “JC” and an image of one woman helping another place a basket of grapes on her head.

  The young Polizist had been watching him closely while he examined the body, and as Pfeffer inspected the ring, the young man suggested, “Jesus Christ?”

  Pfeffer shook his head. “He would put his own initials on a signet ring, don’t you think?” Squatting in the spongy grass, he surveyed the scene for a moment, then asked, “Have you turned him over?”

  “We dug him up and laid him there, otherwise he hasn’t been touched. I was waiting for you to arrive before I moved him. You know how bent out of shape the anthropologists get when they find anything disturbed.”

  Pfeffer thought the way the dead man clenched his left fist was odd, as though he had been holding something dear to him when he died. Furthermore—and this had been fermenting in the detective’s subconscious the entire time—there was just the hint of a smile on the man’s face. But surely that was only Pfeffer’s imagination, or one of those ironic effects of the retarded rate of decay in the peat. People did not, in fact, smile as they were being stabbed. They didn’t. Really.

  He looked into the man’s eye sockets. They had obviously sunken since his death, but it was nevertheless obvious they had been deep-set to begin with and had done their share of glaring at lesser intellects. Pfeffer shivered as he experienced the sensation the cavities were looking back.

  “Open it,” he ordered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The fist. Pry it open.”

  The Polizist motioned for another officer to step over and help him. As they gently lifted the arm, the young man said, “Sir, if I may, are we doing this out of curiosity?”

  “Call it professional intuition. I want to see what he held onto for dear life.”

  “But the anthropologists—”

  “Open it.”

  Getting the fingers to uncurl required the use of pocketknives. The glinting red object that rolled onto the ground before the fist clamped tightly closed again caused the remaining officers to collide with one another as they evacuated their tarp shelter and pressed in for a closer look. It also sent a buzz into the roadkill gallery, whose frustration over a dearth of news had only festered under the drizzling rain.

  If Pfeffer hadn’t known better, he’d have guessed the thing was genuine.

  The drizzle increased to a steady downpour, and the young Polizist, studying the corpse, blurted out something spontaneously: “‘Eternal is the soil in which he was laid, and from which he was made.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just an English poem I read once. Come to think of it, it was Irish.”

  Pfeffer took another look at the bog man’s leathery face. His skull had long since decalcified, leaving the outer skin pinched and distorted. His features were already caving in from rough handling and sudden exposure to ruthless compounds in the air.

  It was a smile, Pfeffer was sure of it. The man had known something profoundly amusing the moment he died, so amusing he was still smiling even after being stabbed in the chest, even after centuries of submersion under the quaking peat.

  TWO

  JOHN GRAF WASN’T COMPILING or editing maps as he normally would be on a weekday morning. Instead, he was reading from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal opened unabashedly on his light table. The newspaper’s front-page headline was one the like of which he’d never expected to see.

  His appearance, reflecting back at him from the glass surface of the light table, revealed his Amish upbringing: short but unruly auburn hair, a close-cropped beard, and hands made rough from spending the first twenty of his twenty-seven years on a farm.

  He glanced up at the other cartographers occupying cubicles around him; all were reading newspapers. All were captivated by the same improbable headline, not that they would return his glance otherwise. The first impression people came away with when they met John was that he preferred they leave him alone. It was a correct impression. But he could only hope they didn’t come away feeling insulted. His eyes stared frankly and uncritically, and if he made people feel transparent, he compensated by finding no flaws in their vitreous souls. He didn’t analyze, he didn’t judge. Most of the time, he didn’t care.

  His closest acquaintances—he had no real friends—considered him a deeply introspective man. The Amish, it pained him to acknowledge, considered him an outcast.

  John’s parents and siblings still lived on a farm east of town, but only his sister Rebecca would speak to him, reluctantly. The Amish community had expelled him for committing the offense of enrolling in high school. After graduating, he had compounded his predicament by attending nearby Franklin & Marshall College. His wanderlust attracted him to geography, his passion for maps to cartography.

  The city of Lancaster had g
rown up alongside John and his Amish neighbors. As a result, its architecture, dominated by narrow row houses composed mainly of red brick and mortar, was almost as plain. And like the Amish, it had remained anachronistic well into maturity.

  John noted many signs of maturity in the town: wrought-iron fences bent from sheer weariness. Warped wooden shutters shedding their louvers. Rusted mailboxes with ill-fitting lids. The sidewalks, undermined by pioneering tree roots and colonized by stubborn tufts of grass, undulated erratically, forming chains of concrete blocks in tectonic collision, making obstacle courses for small children and large bugs.

  The P. Lorillard Building, a former warehouse of the long-defunct P. Lorillard Tobacco Company, stood at the corner of Prince and James. Built in 1899, it served as an elegant example of Beaux Arts classicism with its three-story-high pilasters and large blind arches. Now it was home to North Star Maps, the most prestigious custom mapping firm in the country. The cartographers who worked there were proud of their building; some even believed they could still smell the lingering aroma of drying tobacco leaves.

  A newspaper headline normally would not have distracted John from his work, not even a coast-to-coast news flash printed in enormous bold type. Even those he saved for after work, to read while he ate his frozen dinner of Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and “dessert” (peel back cellophane cover before microwaving; perforate foil with tines of fork). But today all the staff was buzzing about the front-page news. The body found one week ago in a bog north of Hamburg, Germany, had been identified by University of Hamburg historians. They used the victim’s distinctive signet ring as their primary clue and were aided by his clothing, a forensic analysis of his remains, and ultimately his portrait.