The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  Sarah. The alarm bells rang louder, because he knew she was the reason he was anxious about the visit. David could have a frozen dinner if he got hungry, and he could eat it frozen if he had anything derogatory to say about it.

  There was a knock at the door, and John showed the two in.

  David immediately made himself comfortable by allowing gravity to do the work of dropping his backside into a chair. Sarah stood for a moment in the living room, surveying its sparse furnishings. She looked at John and smiled shyly.

  Damn, she was pretty. But pretty wasn’t the word for it. Wearing a simple sleeveless dress with a broad belt around her narrow waist, Sarah was difficult not to look at.

  The three stared awkwardly at the floor for a moment. Then, as though to ease the tension, David removed a short rope from his pocket and pulled it slowly through his left hand. “Where do you want me to cut it?” he challenged John. “Say stop.”

  “Here we go again.” Sarah rolled her eyes.

  “Stop.”

  David opened a pocket knife and sliced the rope near its center. He held up the severed ends and let the two pieces dangle beneath his hand. “Now, since one long rope is more valuable than two short ropes, I’ll restore it.” He tied the two severed ends back together. “Pretty good trick, huh?”

  “No.”

  David coiled the rope in his fist, then uncoiled it, and the knot was gone. “How’s that?”

  “Now it’s a good trick,” John said.

  “Want to know how it works?”

  “Let me guess—magic, right?”

  “There’s no such thing as magic.”

  “You’ve gotten him started,” Sarah warned. She sat down on one end of the couch and yawned.

  “All magic is illusion,” David said. “That’s why I prefer the term illusionist to magician. The rabbit that appears in a hat was in the hat all along. The rope that seems to get cut does get cut, but not in the middle of its length like the audience thinks. The dissolving knot was never tied to begin with. And the levitating girl is resting on a sturdy metal platform—it’s just that nobody can see it.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Sarah said to John. “I have to listen to this shit every day. Let him get it off his chest, then he’ll shut up.”

  “Actually, I find it interesting.” Interesting, as well, that someone who made his living practicing deception should pursue it as a hobby.

  “The audience doesn’t look for the device,” David went on, “that’s not what they came to see. They look for the illusion. They want to be fooled. You don’t have to prove your claim irrefutably, you only have to conceal all evidence to the contrary.”

  There was only one place left in the living room to sit, and it was next to Sarah on the couch. John eased around the coffee table, taking care to position himself exactly in the center of the available space, so it didn’t look like he was trying to get close to her. He felt like a teenager on a date.

  David took a notebook out of his pocket, and John picked his up from the coffee table. Also on the table were books: history books, travel books, map books, gem books; some from F & M, some checked out from the Lancaster Public Library. John’s facsimile of the Palatinate map was rolled out flat on the floor.

  “Okay,” David began. “Let’s start with an inventory of what we already know.” He looked at the others, who were silent. “We have a corpse,” he urged John.

  “We have a corpse,” John acknowledged. “And we have reason to be confident the corpse is Cellarius: the possibility of a hoax has been pretty much eliminated.”

  “Good,” David said. “And it’s clear he was murdered.”

  “It’s obvious. He was struck repeatedly in the chest and abdomen with a pickax. The body had altered too much in the bog acids for the forensics people to decide whether there had been a struggle. But we can assume from his sudden disappearance that he was abducted, probably from his studio.”

  David made a note in his book. “And a ruby was in his fist. I think we agree the ruby, now commonly known as the Cellarius ruby, is a recut of one of the lost Tavernier stones. I suggest the Prairie State ruby is another recut. Enough material is still missing from the original stone to justify searching for yet one more. I haven’t had any luck, though, and it’s possible the material was divided among many small pieces.”

  “How many?” John asked.

  David shrugged. “At one carat apiece, it could be as many as thirty. But that’s just a wild guess. There’s no way we could find such pieces, nor would we be able to reassemble them, so to speak, and put the original Tavernier ruby back together.”

  “How long before everyone knows what you just told us?”

  “Maybe a day. Maybe a year. The Field Museum took the Prairie off display right after the news broke, so I assume somebody on the staff has figured out at least as much as I have. As for the rest of the world, there’s no way to tell. Maybe lots of people know and are just keeping quiet, like we are. Once the press gets hold of it, everyone will know, because the press doesn’t keep quiet about anything.”

  “We have to go at our own pace,” John insisted. “We can’t be worrying about whether we’re ahead of, or behind, the crowd.”

  Sarah crossed her legs, and John saw the gentle curves of her thighs in the periphery of his vision. He glanced up at David, who was watching him.

  Sarah said, “I hope we’re the only ones who have gotten this far.”

  “So do I,” David agreed. “But let’s not get inane, okay? John, you said something the other night about Cellarius smiling when he died. Do you have anything more to add?”

  “No, and I feel kind of silly about it. Nobody smiles while they’re being stabbed. His face was probably just twisted into a smile by the acids in the bog. You know, some animals—cats and dolphins, for instance—often look like they’re smiling, and it means nothing. Having said that, I can’t shake the feeling there was nevertheless something very interesting on his mind.”

  “If there wasn’t something interesting on his mind,” David said, “then there’s nothing interesting for us to look for.”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Cellarius’s last map, the one he finished just before disappearing. I don’t want to rush to any conclusions, but there are several disturbing … what’s the word for them? Coincidences? Incongruities?”

  “Namely?”

  “Well, it was the last thing he did before he died, for what that’s worth. You have to at least wonder whether his death was related to his activities at the time. And it was the only map in his inventory lacking evidence of a commission. He had no reason—no ordinary reason—to make this map.”

  “Of course, there’s always the extraordinary reason.” David jotted down another note.

  “And the area mapped, the lower Palatinate, contains one of the gemstone capitals of the world,” John continued. “This may be pure coincidence, but my instincts suggest otherwise.”

  “Mine as well.”

  “Where, exactly, is the lower Palatinate?” Sarah asked.

  “Roughly where Rheinland-Pfalz is today,” John answered.

  She looked at him blankly.

  “A state in southwest Germany, bordering France.”

  “Oh.”

  “What else disturbs you about the map?” David was still bent over his notebook.

  “The grid pattern. There’s nothing discernibly standard about it. It seems to be totally arbitrary. The map is square—it’s the only square one he ever made—so the number of rows is the same as the number of columns: twenty.”

  “By grid, I assume you mean parallels and meridians.”

  “Essentially, yes. The horizontal lines should show latitude, and the vertical lines, longitude. Of course they do, but what I mean is there should be a scheme, it should make some sense; for example, a line every tenth of a degree, or every twelve thousand yards. But these lines,” he swiped at the map at his feet, “though they’re uniformly spaced, are drawn on
coordinates that are not discrete in any recognizable way.”

  “So,” Sarah smiled broadly, “what you’re saying is the coordinates are indiscreet!”

  The two men looked at her.

  “It was a joke. Sorry.”

  John studied Sarah as she stared at her hands in embarrassment. There was no evidence of the haughtiness he had encountered when he first met her. He glanced at David, then back at Sarah, wondering about the true nature of their relationship. They were obviously comfortable in each other’s presence, like an old married couple. But just like an old married couple, they were mutually distant, rarely making eye contact. John guessed both would be happier with other mates.

  It immediately occurred to him that their problem, as he believed true of all problems, represented an opportunity in disguise. But he quickly put the thought away, attributing his growing fondness for Sarah to her looks and to his sympathy for her plight.

  All he felt for David so far was mild distrust. David was not a man he would associate with under ordinary circumstances. Of course, searching for buried treasure constituted anything but. The two men had agreed to a partnership Tuesday night, and John, for his part, intended to take it seriously. He hoped David did as well.

  “Any more jokes you want to share before we move on?” David asked.

  “Sure,” Sarah answered. “What the hell. If this is a treasure map, why aren’t there marks on it telling us where to dig for treasure?”

  “You mean like an X?” he suggested sarcastically.

  “Well … why not?”

  “Sarah—”

  “Wait,” John interrupted. “She has a point. If we assume this is a treasure map—and there’s little reason to begin a treasure hunt if we don’t—then we might as well interpret its contents as directions to where the treasure is buried.”

  “Fine,” David said. “So … where is the treasure buried?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What contents serve as directions?”

  “The border is decorated with symbols—or what people have been calling runes—that turn out to be elements of the so-called pigpen cipher. It’s true the decipherment produces nothing but garble—for the time being, anyway. However, if Cellarius merely wanted to decorate his border, why would he choose a device that was universally known at the time to be a secret code?”

  “Maybe because it looked pretty,” David said. “I have a friend who made a birthday card for an Iranian friend of hers. My friend thought it would be pretty to decorate the card with some exotic Middle Eastern ‘symbols,’ so she copied a sentence from a language textbook she found in the library. It turned out the language was Persian and what she wrote, quite accidentally, was ‘Meet me at the train station.’ The poor guy sat on a trackside bench for three days.”

  “Anything’s possible,” John admitted. “But if this text does not, in fact, constitute a message, then we have way too little to work with.”

  “Let’s see the decipherment.”

  John unfolded a piece of paper tucked in the back of his notebook and handed it to David.

  “Notice that the first twenty-four characters repeat after character number fifty-eight. It’s because the upper right corner of the map was torn off. They were repeated there to serve as filler, to avoid a blank spot on reproductions. That part of the text is therefore permanently missing. Some people think Cellarius did it intentionally to make the decipherment more difficult.”

  “I don’t know why he would go to the trouble,” David said. “It looks difficult enough as it is.”

  “We have to try to break the code.” John looked directly at Sarah. “We all have to try.”

  “I’ll need to make a copy of this sheet.” David started smoothing out the page on his knee.

  “I already did.” John removed two more pages from his notebook, handed one to Sarah, and kept one for himself. The three then stared at the letters, trying to justify the theory there was order among them.

  John briefly peeked over at Sarah and watched the subtle movement of her lips as she worked out thoughts quietly. He allowed himself the fantasy of kissing those lips; he could feel their softness as they brushed against his own, the wetness as they parted …

  He glanced at David and found him watching again, his eyes smiling. The man knew. And found it amusing. No, amusing wasn’t the word for it; more like pathetic. John and Sarah were almost two different species. Any fantasy John happened to be entertaining about the two of them getting together was—he could see it in David’s eyes—ludicrous.

  “Are we finished talking about the map?” David asked.

  “Just a couple more things,” John said. “The quote that appears in English.”

  “It’s from the Bible. So maybe Cellarius was religious.”

  “Then why didn’t he put biblical quotes on any of his other maps?”

  David was silent.

  “It’s a clue,” John argued. “I don’t know what it means, but it’s something we need to keep branded in our subconscious: ‘All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’”

  “Okay,” David conceded. “We’ll keep it branded in our subconscious. Now to Tavernier.” He turned to a different section in his notebook. “I’d like to focus on just one question: who killed him?”

  John and Sarah glanced at each other. John said, “That question has befuddled historians for three hundred years.”

  “I think it’s a rhetorical question,” David said. “I think we have only one suspect. Tavernier was killed for the gemstones in his possession, and a recut of one of those stones ended up in the fist of Johannes Cellarius.”

  “Yes and no,” John said. “Somebody also killed Cellarius. That means we have two suspects.”

  “But we don’t know who killed him, and we’re running out of characters for this script. We can’t do research on anonymous ghosts.”

  “We have at least one more character: it’s generally acknowledged that Cellarius had an ongoing affair with a woman named Hildegard Weinbrenner, who came from the lower Palatinate—yet another reason to take a hard look at the Palatinate map. What are the odds of a coincidence like that?”

  “Cellarius may have drawn a map of the Palatinate simply because it’s where his girlfriend was from.”

  “And make up a strange grid? And throw in an irrelevant biblical quote? And fill the border with mystical symbols? And make only one print—then destroy the plate? I don’t think so.”

  “Do we know anything about Hildegard Weinbrenner, other than she came from the lower Palatinate and rolled in the hay with our boy?”

  “She was beautiful,” Sarah said.

  John and David looked at her.

  “Well, that’s what the newspaper reported. Also, that she lived in a town called Idar-Oberstein.”

  “Nice to see you can read,” David muttered, which made Sarah blush.

  “What happens now?” John was trying to take the spotlight away.

  “We assign duties,” David said. “Mostly what we have are unanswered questions. But it’s important to identify the right questions before leaping irrationally toward the wrong answers. It’s also important to proceed without delay: the pigpen made the papers, and more clues will undoubtedly follow.”

  He consulted his notebook. “John, you need to dig up everything you can about Cellarius. I’m convinced he killed Tavernier and took the stones. The more we know about him, the closer we get to them. I know you’re already an expert of sorts on the subject, but we need more than we’ve presently got. Write a biography if you have to. Also, you need to study the Palatinate map until you figure out what keeps bothering you about it. And, when you have nothing better to do, break that code.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ve calculated the size and approximate shape of the missing ruby. I’m going to look for it. My instincts tell me that wherever it is, the rest of the lost Tavernier s
tones are likely to be too. I’m also going to research the genealogy, so to speak, of the Prairie State ruby, and investigate Tavernier and his legend as deeply as you’re going to investigate Cellarius and his map.”

  “You’ve been there before,” Sarah reminded him gently.

  “I’ll go there again. So, are we all set?”

  “What about me?” she asked.

  David frowned and scanned his notes. “You seem to have an affinity for Hildegard Weinbrenner. When you’re not gussying yourself up in front of a mirror, see what you can find out about her.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Trust me, it’s plenty. She’s suspect number two. If you want, you can come with me to College Park.”

  “Why College Park?” John asked.

  “The University of Maryland. It’s where I went to school.” He put his notebook back into his pocket. “And you?”

  “Franklin & Marshall.”

  “What’s that, a law firm?”

  “No, a college, here in town.”

  “Oh.”

  After an awkward silence, David said, “Listen, John. Just so there’s no misunderstanding between us later, it would be unproductive to withhold information. I hope you realize that.”

  Rather than respond, John looked down at his shoes.

  “Now,” David rubbed his hands together. “How about something to eat?”

  John stood up. “I have Hamburger Helper,” he said brightly.

  David and Sarah glanced at each other.

  “Hamburger Helper?” Sarah asked.

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Not at all,” David said, rising to his feet. “Hamburger Helper it is.”

  John motioned for Sarah to lead the way into the dining room. Then he followed her, tracing the geometry of her hips with his eyes, watching her skirt sway as she walked. He sensed that David, bringing up the rear, wore the same amused—no, pitying—smile he had worn earlier.

  It could not have been the first time David observed another man scrutinize his girlfriend. But his path had probably never before intersected with another man’s in quite such a way. It remained to be seen how well their paths continued to run together, and for how long.