The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  Yes, his portrait. It was here, reproduced on the front page of the newspaper, from an original in sanguine chalk.

  The man had been—and still was, most of him—Johannes Cellarius, a noted seventeenth-century cartographer, son of a Polish wine merchant who broke with a long family tradition to join a prosperous guild of European mapmakers. In 1689, at the peak of his career, he disappeared without a trace. Historians respected Cellarius for upholding vigorous standards during an era when mapmakers still relied on the hearsay of excitable voyagers and decorated their maps with fantastic beasts that allegedly roamed the unexplored lands.

  John turned the page and read on.

  The signet ring found on Cellarius’s right middle finger was solid gold—in fact, 22 karat. It was set with an oval slab of chalcedony. The image engraved in the chalcedony, one that would stand out in relief when pressed into wax, was of one woman helping another place a basket of grapes on her head. Copied from a detail on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the image was known as the Michelangelo signet.

  University of Hamburg historians were able to ascribe Cellarius’s breeches, stockings, and shoe buckles to the seventeenth century; he had dressed himself on the morning of his death in the manner of a middle-class craftsman of the 1680s. Forensic scientists suggested a date of death that was in close agreement with the date of the craftsman’s disappearance.

  But as far as John was concerned, the picture nailed it. The newspaper had printed a photograph of the corpse’s head side-by-side with a reproduction of the chalk drawing. The prominent forehead, protruding brow, and deep-set eyes that were so conspicuous in the drawing were unmistakably shadowed in the photograph. Despite three centuries of metamorphosis in the bog, the resemblance was striking.

  It was Johannes Cellarius. There was no doubt about it.

  Judging from the drawing, Cellarius had the gentle, pampered face of royalty; the long, wild hair of an eccentric intellect; and the passionate eyes of an artist. To John Graf, it was as though Don Quixote had quit his windmills and settled down to engrave roads and rivers.

  Who would have thought a seventeenth-century cartographer would make the front page of a modern newspaper? Some of the other cartographers at North Star were now running upstairs to the library to dig up anything they could find about Cellarius. But John remained at his light table. Let them scramble for stuff. He was an avid map collector, buying facsimiles whenever he couldn’t afford the originals, and he probably had all the master’s work in one form or another at home. He continued reading the article.

  By some accounts, Cellarius had been done in by the jealous husband of his lover, the Palatinate beauty Hildegard Weinbrenner. The eleven perforations of his chest and abdomen—from blows delivered by what the autopsy suggested was a pickax—attested to violent murder. The last map Cellarius completed, its ink barely dry when it was discovered in his studio after his disappearance, was one of Hildegard’s homeland, the lower Palatinate—modernday Rheinland-Pfalz.

  But that wasn’t the end of the story. Something was clenched tightly in Cellarius’s left fist, and when the German police officers who were called in to investigate a possible homicide pried open the fingers, a large red gemstone rolled out.

  It was a ruby. It weighed more than 57 carats. Some said it ranked among the best ever examined.

  There was a brief controversy over the stone at first, started by a Hamburg jeweler who suggested it was only red spinel, like the so-called Black Prince’s ruby garnishing the British Imperial State Crown. From biblical times to the Industrial Revolution, all red stones, including spinel, were popularly known as rubies.

  To end the controversy, a team of mineralogists flew in from the University of Heidelberg. It took them only minutes, using a refractometer and a spectroscope, to declare the ruby genuine. The newspaper article included a close-up photograph of the stone; in the background, slightly out of focus, were three beaming technicians in lab coats.

  John felt the presence of someone behind him. Annette, a woman who occupied the cubicle across the hall, was looking over his shoulder.

  “Now that’s what I would call gruesome,” she said.

  He glanced at her, then back at the newspaper. “When I’ve been dead for three hundred years, I hope I look every bit as good.”

  Annette was a frequent visitor; John’s workspace served as her break room. He had disciplined himself not to peek across the hall while she leaned over her light table, because the profile of her breasts constituted his greatest professional distraction.

  “We really ought to step out together sometime, Amish boy. When do you think that might happen?”

  When God forgives the serpent for deceiving Eve, John thought. Normally he would banter with her, but he was in no mood today.

  “I know you like girls,” Annette continued. “I saw you with one once.”

  “No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

  “Yes, I did. But don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. She actually looked pretty good—from the eyebrows up, anyway. Cute bonnet.”

  “You must be talking about my sister.”

  “Ah. Back to work I go!” She hurried across the hall and returned to her seat.

  John watched her lean forward to peer into her computer screen, then he forced himself to turn away and focus on the newspaper instead. He wasn’t going to get any work done today. Of all historic figures, the one he admired most, the one whose creative style and work ethic he most emulated, had made a return appearance. In the flesh.

  John’s house on Nouveau Street was within walking distance of the P. Lorillard Building. The house was equipped with a window air conditioner, but John had tested it only once. It blew a gale of icy wind in his face, and he immediately shut it off. The only other gadget in his otherwise austere quarters was a microwave oven he used to heat up his frozen dinners. He didn’t feel he had a choice; he couldn’t so much as bake a potato.

  He spent the evening in his living room, poring over the newspaper article and digging up references in books. He didn’t know the first thing about gemstones. And like everyone else, he couldn’t imagine what connection Johannes Cellarius might have had with them.

  Johannes Cellarius! Face to face with the greatest mapmaker of all time—dead for over three hundred years!

  He stared long into the evening at his facsimile of Cellarius’s last map, the one whose ink was barely dry when the great cartographer disappeared from his studio. He had no idea what he was looking for. The map was of Germany’s lower Palatinate: its roads, villages, and topography.

  He remembered the warnings of mapmakers of old, who drew boundary lines at the limits of the known inhabited world and wrote, “Beyond this place, there be dragons.” He remembered the warnings but didn’t intend to heed them.

  Water was set to boil for coffee. A frozen dinner went into the microwave. Maps and facsimiles came out of a cabinet. Within minutes, the professional life of Johannes Cellarius was comprehensively delineated on the living room floor.

  They made up the core of John’s personal collection: maps of the Americas, Europe, the Holy Land, even the moon. Maps so beautiful they continued to sell in facsimile for framing and hanging. Maps so accurate, navigators could still use them without danger of getting lost or hitting a reef.

  Hamburg, where Cellarius kept his studio, was but one of eighteen major cartographic capitals of seventeenth-century Europe. And what a time to be a cartographer! Europe and Africa were familiar; continental outlines of the time looked much as they did on modern maps. But the Orient was still a mystery, and exploration of the New World was just getting underway.

  John gladly would have traded centuries with Cellarius. The modern globe was too well explored for the spirited adventurer; there weren’t any significant blank places left. Even the ocean floor was thoroughly charted. And they were mapping celestial bodies as fast as they found them—not that a spirited adventurer stood much chance of visiting any of those. All John
could do was gaze at Cellarius’s maps and dream.

  And exquisite maps they were. Uniquely among cartographers of his time, or any time, Cellarius signed and dated each copy. He was one of the first to recognize that maps were not only tools of navigation and geography, they were also works of art. He did not publish atlases, but his maps were so often copied by his contemporaries that some atlases contained little more than thinly disguised Cellarius reproductions.

  The creations eventually diffused into the general trade, losing more and more identity with each generation. Cellarius, perhaps the most obscure of the great cartographers, arguably had the most pronounced overall influence on the look of modern maps and on the high standard for accuracy that subsequently characterized the industry.

  John was prone on his living room floor, his chin propped up in his hands, his elbows planted in the carpet like a bipod. The hour grew late, and he failed to notice the chimes of his grandfather clock.

  Cellarius’s studio occupied the north bank of the Norderelbe, location of the present-day St. Pauli fish market. He was a character at the docks, welcoming the mariners when they returned from their voyages so that he might profit from their knowledge: “I endeavor to be good to them, to provide for their many wants after their long journies upon the sea; to bring them foodstuffs and drink and tobacco, and to have readie the fairest maidenes of the wharf, reserving these latter in advance with a modest deposit. In this manner I am the first and only to acquire such information as I may seeke concerning the new landfalls, though owing to certain priorities I am usuallie suffered to wait for the next morning to get it down on parchment.”

  Reports of travelers varied in reliability. Sea-going navigators were frequently off by profound longitudinal distances, owing to shifting winds and currents. Land-going navigation was not all that much easier, hampered as it was by the difficulty of estimating distance traveled over rough terrain.

  Cellarius said of one reporter: “Where might take me three days to arrive, might take him three weeks, for he is either modest of his overland feats, perpetualie lost, or delayed by the brothels, and I suspect all of these. The only other possibilitie being that villages migrate upstream and down, and hills are but ripples in the land like folds in a rugg that go hither and thither when trod upon.”

  In a letter to another, Cellarius was more caustic: “You do not find east by pissing into the wind and watching to see which way it will flye. Nor do you learn navigation in a canoe, which is obviouslie where you have learned it, and napped through the lessones besides. My cat navigates a good sighte better, and he has been dead a month and more.”

  And to another: “Your sounding man was clearlie intoxicated.”

  Cellarius was unscrupulously honest; if he didn’t know the source of a river, he didn’t invent one. Instead, he truncated the river to show that it was still unexplored, or unreliably explored. This practice incited men to push upstream in search of sources. “For,” in Cellarius’s words, “there is no call to pack ones staff and bootes like a blank place on a map.” Likewise, if he was unsure of a boundary, he suggested it with a dotted or dashed line. In the seventeenth century, trustworthy explorers removed at least as many features from maps as they contributed to them.

  John packed his maps and facsimiles back into the cabinet and went to bed with the warning of the ages on his mind: Beyond this place, there be dragons … there be dragons …

  Cellarius’s last map of the lower Palatinate bothered him. It had always bothered him, but he had never been able to put his finger on the problem. For some reason, the map had lurked in his subconscious ever since he’d first laid eyes on it.

  What was it about that sheet of parchment? What was he seeing but not recognizing?

  Also crowding his thoughts, as his head sank into the pillow, were images of Johannes Cellarius before and after: the affluent craftsman sitting proudly for a portrait, his deep-set eyes gazing poignantly at the artist, and the gnarled corpse, limbs in disarray, cavernous eyes staring vacantly at the sky.

  John knew his interest in Cellarius was more than professional, more than academic, more than a mere expression of respect. It was mystical, as though the two were related by blood, and the three centuries that separated them had been compressed to a single moment by layers of placid and biding peat.

  THREE

  DAVID FREEMAN WAS DAYDREAMING about rubies. He knew he ought to be preparing himself for the next half-hour or so, because the nuances of his speech and body language would be crucial to the success of his mission. But he couldn’t help it. The stones in the window were exquisite.

  It was a compliment to the owners of Nineveh & Shimoda, a jewelry store on Sansom Street in Philadelphia. It was the only compliment David would have for them today.

  David, whose real surname was Feinstein, considered himself fortunate to have been born with a face few people could recall; it was the kind of blurry composition police artists always seemed to produce from witness descriptions. Every time he saw a “wanted” poster, he thought, That could be me. Sometimes it was.

  He wished he were taller—at least as tall as other grown men approaching thirty. In an effort to compensate, he always stood as straight as he could, and the practice lent an aura of arrogance to his posture.

  Accompanying David to Nineveh & Shimoda was his girlfriend, for lack of a better word. Sarah Sainte-James, whose real surname was Smith, had once been a model for the women’s underwear advertisements that appeared as supplements to the Philadelphia Inquirer—until squabbling incidents with photographers, some leading to bites and scratches, resulted in their unanimous refusal to work with her again.

  “Are you ready?” David asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You remember everything I told you?”

  “Yes, for Christ’s sake.”

  He looked her over. Her skirt was short, too short for any purpose other than exhibitionism. But today’s target, a man David had followed down crowded city streets, had voyeuristic eyes that aimed low.

  “Hitch it up,” he ordered.

  “Come on, David, give me a break.”

  He grabbed the waistline of the skirt and pulled it up a couple of inches. “There,” he said. “It’s showtime.”

  David had chosen a day for the duo’s first visit to Nineveh & Shimoda when both the manager and assistant manager would be present. It was important that the manager see them. But it was the assistant manager, one Mr. Bowling, who was centered in David’s crosshairs. Bowling was in his early thirties, wore circular, wire-rim glasses, and combed his tenuous filaments from ear to ear. He leaned toward the heavy side but packed it well into rumpled suits. His ties never quite reached to his belt.

  It was his eyes, though, that gave him away: he always feared that the person he was trying to sell something to was not going to buy something from him. David had followed him after work one day, noting his taste for legs and his insecure gait. They had parted at the bus stop. It was all the destination David needed to know.

  Once inside the store, he assessed the security. The jewelry cases were made of unbreakable acrylic rather than glass, to deter smash-and-grab thieves. Motion detectors peered down from strategic corners of the ceiling. And although the store was large, it was well lit and there were no blind spots; the owners were able to watch every transaction from a glass-walled booth, one they presumably also used to close big sales and conduct appraisals.

  The booth was dark at the moment. Either the lights were off or the wall consisted of one-way glass. If the latter, David had a problem; the diamond solitaire case faced the booth, so any sleight of hand employed on Mr. Bowling might go down in full view of someone charged with making sure Mr. Bowling didn’t fall victim to sleight of hand.

  High and low electronic beams spanned the store entrance. A surveillance camera with a wide-angle lens spied on the sales floor. And broad, flat mirrors covered the walls; these not only created the illusion the store was larger, they allowed staff memb
ers to observe customer behavior when their backs were turned. The owners might not have been any good at selling jewelry, but they apparently had experience getting ripped off.

  David took Sarah’s hand and led her through the store. The two peered timidly into showcases, whispering and pointing. The manager, a study in corpulent dignity, stood near the darkened booth with his hands clasped behind his back and his feet planted far enough apart to keep his balance. David could already read his mind: Here comes one.

  The assistant manager, Mr. Bowling, had posted himself in the geographic center of the store, where inexperienced salespeople tended to think they enjoyed a statistical advantage. He kept glancing at the other salesperson on duty, a densely freckled redhead in a low-cut blouse.

  David had to reach Bowling before the others took advantage of an open field. But as he maneuvered closer, the manager launched himself on an intercept course, and the redhead stepped out from behind her showcase, stretching her facial muscles into a rehearsed smile.

  David took three quick strides toward his target. “I know you from somewhere,” he said to Bowling.

  The manager stopped.

  The redhead, who had already been offering a handshake from several yards away, retracted her arm and used it to smooth back her hair.

  Bowling scanned David’s face in confusion; the recognition was not mutual. “I… um …”

  “College Park,” David said. “You were a student there, weren’t you?”

  “Why, yes. Yes, I was!”

  “And we were in the same …”

  “… class together?”

  “We sat next to each other! Don’t you remember?” David was as much into Bowling’s face as he could get. He wanted to crowd out the competition. From the corner of one eye, he watched the manager lean back against a case and put his hands in his pockets. From the other, he saw the redhead hurry toward the entrance to greet a customer entering the store.