The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  “Well, what do you know,” Quimby said. “A ghost from Christmas past.”

  “It’s been a long time,” John admitted. Quimby hadn’t changed: an oval face, bulbous nose, and bald pate made him look like a clown without makeup. Still, he was one of the best teachers John ever had.

  “That’s the way of it, you know. I teach my students all I can, then I kick them out of the nest, and the moment they learn to fly, they forget who taught them. Do you know that out of hundreds of students I have every year, year after year, the only ones who return to visit are the ones who got a D?”

  “So now you know why I’ve never visited. You gave me a C.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. In medieval history.” John had worked harder in that class than any other in his life.

  “That explains it. My killer course. You might have gotten the highest grade.”

  They shook hands warmly.

  “Seriously,” John said. “I’ve always meant to visit. It’s just something I never seem to get around to doing.”

  “I understand completely, what with your job taking you so far away. Where is it, way over on James Street, right?”

  John felt himself blushing. “Come on. Don’t rub it in.”

  “So what brings you here today?”

  He tapped his tray. “The food, of course. I got addicted to it during the four years I spent here, and I can’t break the habit.”

  “Is the pigpen keeping you busy?”

  “Now, listen. North Star may not be a palace, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a pigpen, either.”

  “No, I mean the pigpen cipher.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That page you’ve been studying.” He pointed to the sheet of paper in front of John. “It’s written using the pigpen cipher. Didn’t you know that was its name?”

  “Ah, no, I didn’t.”

  “No wonder you got a C in medieval history. The pigpen was popular in the Middle Ages, especially among Freemasons.”

  Quimby took the sheet from John’s hands and smoothed it out on the table. “Let’s see if we can improve your grade.”

  EIGHT

  ELEANOR HALL, FEATURES EDITOR of the Chicago Tribune, slammed the door of the conference room as she entered. Her naturally red hair looked like it had caught fire. She threw a current edition of the Trib onto the conference table, where four of her junior editors sat wringing their hands, knowing that unscheduled staff meetings only meant bad news.

  The paper spun several times on the polished table.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” she asked when the paper came to rest.

  The four remained silent. Finally one of them raised his hand.

  “Justin?”

  Justin cleared his throat. “Ma’am, ours is the only major newspaper in the country not to reveal the identity of the pigpen cipher?”

  “Ah! I suspected something was amiss.”

  She sat down at the table, closed her eyes, and ran her fingers through her hair. “All right. This Tavernier affair is dominating the news. Actually, it’s overwhelming the news. I want stories. Your assignment is to interview puzzlers, historians, cartographers, treasure hunters—everybody. The jewels aren’t going to be found; the real treasure here is the opportunity to sell newspapers. My boss knows it, and he has made sure I know it, and now I’m making sure you know it. Any questions?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Justin closed his eyes before speaking. “Is there any travel and expense money available?”

  Eleanor Hall glared at him. “Tell you what, Justin. If you wear out your shoes walking between your PC and my desk because you’re bringing me stories, I’ll personally buy you a new pair.”

  David met Sarah at a diner on Market Street, where she was nibbling on a plate of fries. He joined her in the booth.

  “Did you get it?” she asked.

  He removed a folded envelope and a small plastic bag from his shirt pocket. He unzipped the bag first and showed her a four-prong Tiffany ring mount. Stamped inside the shank were “18K” and the image of a lightning bolt.

  “How much was it?” Sarah asked.

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  “You could have gotten it from a jobber for less.”

  “True, but the jobber would come with a disconcertingly wide gap in his face known as a mouth.”

  David unfolded the envelope next, after first pressing it between his thumb and fingers to find the lump, and removed a colorless, amorphous stone from the soft blue tissues inside. It looked like an ordinary piece of abraded glass.

  “We have until Sunday,” he said. “That’s the last day of the month.”

  “Don’t put it off until the night before, like you always do. You know how you tend to underestimate these jobs.”

  The waitress arrived to take David’s order. Sarah listened, blinking in disbelief, as he itemized a quarter chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, French fries, fluffy butter biscuits, a half-dozen zesty chicken morsels, and a cardboard envelope containing Granny’s apple pie—a pie that, when bit into, would release the thermal energy of an exploding star.

  “That’s enough food to make a starving fat man cry for mercy,” Sarah complained, wrinkling her nose. She pushed her own half-eaten plate of French fries away. Then she watched as David’s eyes followed the waitress back to the kitchen.

  “Satisfying?” she asked.

  “Oh, she could satisfy me, all right,” he replied. “She could do it easily. In fact, I bet she could do it lying down.”

  “That’s one of your traits I respect, David. You don’t hide your crushes. If you did, I might have to get jealous. And suspicious.”

  “They don’t call it a crush anymore, honey. Nowadays, it’s known as a hard-on. By the way, did you get the job?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, one of the photographers recognized me.”

  “Well, give it a few years. When you’re old and ugly they won’t recognize you, and maybe they’ll want to take your picture again.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  When the food arrived, David ploughed into it as though the platter were an open-pit mine.

  “How can you stand gnawing on bones like that?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m higher up the food chain than they are. I don’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “If you saw what they do to it in the kitchen, you might.”

  “The thing about food is, the more hands that touch it, the better it seems to taste.”

  “At a five-star restaurant, maybe. But not at the Poultry Palace.”

  “Move over a little bit so I can watch the waitress while I eat. Hurry, she’s about to bend over.”

  “You’re disgusting.” She picked up a French fry and nibbled on it halfheartedly. “Any progress on the ruby?”

  “Not yet, but give me a couple of days. If other portions of the recut exist, and if they’re as big as Bancroft says they are, there’ll be photographs of them somewhere, you can be sure of that.”

  “Can I help in any way?”

  David almost choked on his food.

  “I guess that means no,” Sarah said in mock resignation. “At least I could help look for maps.”

  David shook his head. “Every idiot with a pipe dream has his name on a waiting list at the libraries. The poster shops are sold out. The distributors that supply the poster shops are sold out. Granted, people have been looking for this treasure for three hundred years, and the ruby is the first real clue to emerge. But even I don’t get it. It’s the Cabbage Patch craze happening all over again.”

  “You have contacts at College Park.”

  “I already tried.”

  “And?”

  “No way. It seems one of the vice presidents has put a hold on all that material, apparently for the personal use of his sociopathic offspring.”

  “It sounds like a lot of people are already working on the mystery.”

  “Oh, not more than three or four thousand in P
hiladelphia alone. I have to find somebody, anybody, who has copies of Cellarius’s maps. The natural kind of person to look for, of course, is a cartographer.” He glanced at his watch and pushed his chair away from the table. “Before someone else beats me to it.”

  Mannfred Gebhardt watched Frieda Blumenfeld size him up as he settled uncomfortably into a chair. She had complimented his looks so many times in the past, she didn’t need to repeat the words again: he was younger looking than his thirty years, a quality she clearly envied. Clean-cut, with hair appropriately short for a man, whatever that meant. And he always wore a tie, a habit that met with her approval. He tried to remember whether he always wore ties before the Blumenfeld Era, or whether he had started doing so merely to garner her favor. He was sure the precipitate intensity in his gray eyes was always there, because he’d heard it from others.

  Blumenfeld’s living room was a microcosm of her paradigm, a showcase for her tastes, accomplishments, and ambitions. She warmed visibly as she entered the room, much as an architect did when visiting a building he had designed. Gebhardt knew that some of the oil paintings were fakes, especially those whose signatures raised the eyebrows of visitors. But the inevitable question—Is this real?—had become simple for Blumenfeld to answer: Oh, please.

  On the other hand, she seemed to relish explaining how she had discovered the Etruscan vase in a quaint little shop in Cerveteri during a stopover while visiting Rome. So many times had she told the story, she apparently had forgotten the little forger with bad teeth who had personally delivered it to her house, and that her visit to Italy had been on a bus tour, one that did not include Cerveteri.

  Like Blumenfeld, Gebhardt lived in Mainz. But unlike his worldly and sophisticated partner, he occupied a room above one of the department stores downtown, rather than a highbrow mansion on Rosenstockstrasse. Blumenfeld had never visited the place, but that didn’t stop her from superciliously predicting that his carpet was wearing through to the floorboards and paint was peeling from his walls.

  The paintings, figurines, and other knick-knacks in Blumenfeld’s living room were charming, Gebhardt conceded. But they may as well have had those little cards in front of them that said, DO NOT TOUCH or IF YOU JUST BROKE IT, YOU JUST BOUGHT IT. The living room was for show, not for living. At the same time, there was the slightest hint of fatigue about the floorings and furniture. Yes, he thought, Blumenfeld’s home was descending toward his own, which—she was correct—did indeed have holes in the carpet and cracks in the paint.

  Blumenfeld put on a pair of reading glasses that were clipped to opera-length eyeglass chains made of gold filigree. When the glasses rested on her nose, the chain fell in loops on either side of her face and resembled mechanical jowls.

  “‘Ruby and sapphire,’” she recited from a book, “‘are the same mineral—corundum—differing only in their color. When chromium atoms replace some of the aluminum atoms in corundum, a red color results. Iron and titanium impurities account for blue.’” She looked up from the book, her eyes peering at Gebhardt over the rim of her glasses. “Were you aware of that?”

  “I confess I was not.” Gebhardt knew he was in for a tiresome afternoon; the old woman was already affecting her stage voice. “I suppose this exercise has a point.”

  “Saturation, my dear Gebhardt. That’s how you solve a complicated problem. Mathematicians have practiced it since the days of Archimedes. Saturate your consciousness with the facts of the problem, and your subconscious mind will go to work on it as well. It sometimes happens that you awake in the morning with the solution reverberating inside your head. Now listen.” She flipped to a page she had marked. “‘The ancient Indians,’” she read, “‘believed rubies vanquished enemies, and when ground up and consumed, served as a love potion.’ You see, Mannfred? Hope for you yet if we find them.”

  “For us both.”

  “Here’s something. ‘From Burma, the oldest source of rubies, comes a legend about a mystical valley strewn liberally with the precious stones. The valley was so deep, the bottom couldn’t be seen from the summits. To get at the stones, gem hunters cast pieces of freshly butchered sheep into the valley, knowing as they did that rubies adhere to raw meat.’”

  “Do they?”

  “Of course not. But the legend continues: ‘Vultures would snatch up the meat and carry it to the summits, and the people only had to chase the birds away to recover the stones.’”

  “At least those people had something to work with.”

  “‘Red spinel was often confused with ruby; such stones were known as balas rubies. Perhaps the most famous balas ruby is the so-called Black Prince’s Ruby, a 170-carat spinel in the center of the Maltese Cross on the British Imperial State Crown. Its history is murky; no one knows how it came to the Tower of London, where it shares the crown with Cullinan II, the Second Star of Africa … and 2,800 other diamonds.’”

  “You’re drooling, Frieda.”

  “Oh, if security weren’t so tight …”

  “Well, you studied stealing in college. Breaking and entering surely must have been part of the curriculum.”

  “Finance, Mannfred. I studied finance.”

  “A rose by any other name.”

  “Well, let’s talk about your major: classics. On a ranking of most useful subjects to least useful subjects, yours would place just about … oh my, it falls off the list altogether!”

  “If it weren’t for historians—”

  “But you didn’t study history, you studied Greek and Roman mythology. You studied events that never happened, documented in languages no one ever speaks. If you had really studied history, you might be able to help me with this research. Speaking of which … where are the maps?”

  “They—will—be—here.”

  “Now, don’t get petulant. Your ways are impractical, just like your choice of major, and you know it. If you were a little less idealistic, you’d have a political party of your own by now, instead of a handful of unemployed friends who throw rocks at public speakers and can’t even score a hit.”

  “You’re one of my friends, Frieda.”

  After a moment of silence, Blumenfeld said, “I prefer to see myself as your mentor.” She opened a notebook and signaled for Gebhardt to crouch on the floor next to the coffee table. Once he did, it was hard for him to concentrate on anything but the chains dangling from her glasses; they did a synchronized dance each time the old woman bobbed her head.

  Blumenfeld drew a pair of tick-tack-toe grids and a pair of large Xs, then filled each partitioned space with a letter, or a letter and a dot.

  “It’s as old as the hills but didn’t get much use until the Freemasons adopted it to encipher their printed rituals. The modern form consists of four grids, the first two of the tick-tack-toe variety, containing nine letters each, the second two resembling large Xs, containing four letters each. A dot occupies each space of the second tick-tack-toe and the second X. There are enough spaces for twenty-six letters of the alphabet, entered top to bottom, left to right.

  “Thus the letter A resembles a reverse L, O resembles an E with a dot replacing its center stroke, S resembles a V, and Y resembles a less-than sign, filled with a dot. Using the pigpen is simple: you pull out the shape associated with the letter of choice and add a dot as appropriate. This is how Johannes Cellarius would have spelled his name in pigpen; your name is underneath.”

  “Impressive,” Gebhardt said. “So what does the text in the margin of the map say?”

  “Regrettably, it comes up gibberish.” She flipped to the front of the notebook and showed him her decipherment:

  Gebhardt rose from the floor and returned to his chair. “Now are you finally convinced the shit is just border decoration?”

  “Not at all. It’s likely a deeper layer of decipherment is needed.”

  “Wait a minute. You said there was room for twenty-six letters. There are more than twenty-six letters in the German alphabet.”

  “I would be surprised if
the language turned out to be German. In fact, I’m betting one of us is going to have to employ his Latin skills.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Gebhardt broke away and looked out the window. He wondered whether he could get his old job back.

  “Don’t start panicking yet,” Blumenfeld said. “I know Latin was not your strongest subject. You have time to brush up. Meanwhile, I found it prudent to learn what other ciphers were popular in Cellarius’s day. There were several, but the most common was one called the Vigenère. Unfortunately, we need a keyword to make the Vigenère work, or even to establish whether or not it was used.”

  Blumenfeld gestured for Gebhardt to view her notebook again. He rubbed his eyes, then got up and stood over the coffee table with his arms crossed. Blumenfeld was going to attack the puzzle relentlessly until she solved it. Until she could replace her Etruscan vase with a real one.

  “The modern version,” she said, “a derivation of the one originally devised by Blaise de Vigenère in his 1586 Traicté des Chiffres, employs a polyalphabetic sliding tableau.” She turned the page in her notebook and showed him the 26 x 26 table she had drawn.

  “Both sender and receiver must know the keyword. Repeating it above the cipher text in a one-to-one correspondence, the receiver finds each letter of the keyword in the vertical alphabet, then traces across into the tableau to the corresponding letter of the cipher text. Tracing up from that point, he identifies the plaintext letter in the horizontal alphabet. For example, the keyword ‘ruby’ would direct the receiver to interpret klfyjosc as follows:

  “The Vigenère was in common use during Cellarius’s life, so it’s as good a place as any to start. Breaking the code boils down to discovering his choice of keyword.”

  Gebhardt went back to his chair. “It looks like we have a hard road ahead of us on that one.”