FIFTEEN
FRIDAY MORNING JOHN CALLED in sick. It was the first time he had ever done so, sick or well, and his vigorous good health only deepened the guilt.
He returned to Franklin & Marshall, to the glass-and-steel Erwin Raisz Institute of Mapping Sciences. He had no legitimate access to either the manuscripts or the maps, but he had dressed in his Amish clothes, complete with straw hat, and was affecting a German accent. The young woman staffing the entrance to the climate-controlled facility pointed out that his student ID card was no longer valid but couldn’t bring herself to turn him away.
“Just don’t do anything that will get me in trouble, okay?”
“Do not vorry. I vill not.”
He descended to the first underground floor and took a deep breath. It had been almost six years since he viewed any part of the collection. Tentatively pulling open one of the myriad aluminum drawers, he found the oldest map in the Raisz Institute, exactly where he had left it: a highly stylized 1475 illustration of the Holy Land.
He stared at it for a few minutes, as he would any other friend he had not seen in years. Major geographical features—oceans, rivers, mountain ranges—were abstractly depicted and more or less arbitrarily located, rendering the map functionally useless. But to John it was an object of beauty.
Compass roses, winged cherubs, and figures of the wind-blowers adorned the empty spaces on medieval maps and charts, as did heraldic emblems, cartouches, and scrolls. If cartographers were unsure of the content, they could at least offer the consumer a feast for his eyes and some fodder for his imagination.
John removed his straw hat and ran his fingers through his hair. What he needed to examine wasn’t in the aluminum cabinets—or anywhere else on the first two underground floors of the Raisz Institute. It was in the institute’s collection of uncatalogued manuscripts.
The problem was access: they had no reason to grant it to him, and his straw hat and German accent were not likely to be of any help.
The Raisz Institute extended three stories underground; the manuscript room was the back half of the lowest floor. Actually it was a steel cage, more vault than room. The entrance guard glanced at John’s student ID card and failed to notice that it had long since expired. That was because an even greater deficiency distracted him.
“You need a professor’s sponsorship to enter the cage,” he told John.
“Dr. Antonelli is sponsoring me.” There’s another one for confession, John thought; too many more of these and he’d spend the rest of his life kneeling. All he needed now was for the guard to demand proof of sponsorship.
“Do you have that in writing?” the guard asked.
“He’s on his way here now.”
“Then we’ll wait for him.”
“It may be a while. And besides, he’s expecting me to complete some work before he gets here.”
The guard exhaled loudly, picked up the phone, and asked the college operator for Antonelli’s office. John held his breath.
“There’s no answer at his office,” the guard said.
“I told you, he’s on his way, but he’s running a couple of errands first. We’re researching Amish culture, especially clashes with local townsfolk.”
Their eyes locked for several long seconds.
“Wipe your feet,” the guard said, and opened the cage door.
John went immediately to one of the more than fifteen hundred acid-free archival document boxes and pulled on its plastic handle. He didn’t know what was in the box but wanted to give the impression he did. After a few minutes of pretending to study its contents, he no longer felt the guard’s eyes burning holes in his back and was free to explore the room.
Then he began a systematic search. He knew what he was looking for. He knew it was there, somewhere. What he didn’t know was how quickly he would find it.
In one of the archival boxes, one containing a section labeled “Misc Corresp 17th Cent,” were folders filled with letters written by seventeenth-century cartographers. One of the folders bore the label “J Cellarius.” John removed the delicate sheets of parchment and read them one by one, allowing them to rest gently on the palm of his shaking hand to avoid subjecting them to dimensional strain.
He closed his eyes briefly to catch his bearings; the story behind the letters had begun long before Cellarius wrote them. If their contents were reliable, he had a motive for the murder of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.
The Thirty Years’ War had ended in 1648. A student in London at the time, Cellarius left for the war-ravaged lands, some said because he killed a fellow student. The push factor must have been powerful, because there were no pull factors drawing him to the Palatinate, where he initially settled.
Perhaps he was seeking opportunity: the war had buried most of Germany’s men. So great was the shortage of men that in 1650, the Congress of Franconia legalized polygamy to replenish the population. No one under sixty could join a monastery. Unmarried women were taxed. Priests were encouraged to forsake one of their vows. The country could not rise out of its ashes until it had spawned a sufficient workforce.
No one knew what Cellarius did during his years in the Palatinate. The late 1650s found him in Amsterdam as an apprentice cartographer, and by 1660 he had published his first independent map, one of the city, showing property boundaries. In 1672, aged thirty-nine, he abruptly moved his studio to Hamburg.
Why? What happened in Amsterdam in 1672?
John glanced up at the cage guard. He was busy arguing with a janitor who was insisting he had to clean inside the cage.
Louis XIV was jealous of Holland’s commercial success. Dutch ships ruled the seas. Dutch trading had made Holland wealthy. Also, Louis wanted the Rhein, and Holland controlled its mouth.
Guarding against French expansionism, Jan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, allied his country with England and Sweden and tried in vain to enlarge his military. France declared war on April 6, 1672. Louis himself led his armies into Holland, where they enjoyed a string of victories before laying siege to Amsterdam and The Hague. De Witt, unwilling to see his cities destroyed, surrendered conditionally. But the terms Louis demanded were too stiff: control of all roads, rivers, and canals, and a conversion of the entire United Provinces to Catholicism.
De Witt refused. Instead, so that neither French nor Dutch would have Holland, he opened the dikes and flooded the land.
Louis and his armies retreated. Back in France, the Sun King was deified by his subjects, although the peasants were reduced to eating roots and acorns, so great was the financial burden of war.
Jan de Witt was hung from a lamppost by his own people.
And here was the golden egg in the archival box, on a sheet of parchment in John’s hand: Cellarius had lost his young Palatinate-born wife, Charmaine, in the flooding, and had vowed to take revenge on Louis XIV.
“Grief attackes you on three levels,” he wrote to a friend in London. “On the first, you are sorry for someone elses loss; you are sorry her life ended and she will not have the opportunitie to witness another sunrise or smell the fragrance of a rose. This grief passes quicklie. On the second level, you are sorry for your own loss, that you will never again take pleasure in her sweete companie. This grief passes after a long time. On the third level, the deepest level, you regret everything you did not do or say, and should have. This grief never passes.”
His opportunity for revenge would not come until seventeen years later. Eventually, he paid the price for it with his own life. He spent those seventeen years in Hamburg, where he dreamed of shifting the world’s cartography capital. His revenge, when it came, was but a flea bite to Louis XIV, and Hamburg never aspired to the grieving man’s dreams.
David Freeman was right: Cellarius had to have masterminded the Tavernier robbery. He had allegedly been corresponding with Tavernier for mapping purposes, and Tavernier had obviously told him of his plans to make a seventh voyage. The correspondence wasn’t in the box, but John could i
magine Cellarius’s reply: “Dear Sir, make haste in your preparationes, for my maps hanker for fresh ink (and my heart for justice).” Unable to reach Louis personally, Cellarius tried to punish him by stealing gemstones Tavernier had bought on his behalf.
Sadly, the joke was on Cellarius. In 1688 Louis once again invaded Charmaine’s homeland. In 1689, even while Cellarius anticipated the fruits of his revenge, the king’s armies razed the Palatinate and deprived its citizens of food. Now with the largest military force ever assembled in history—450,000 men, and another 100,000 in the navy—the king melted and donated his personal silverware to help finance war.
Homes burned, castles fell, and peasants ran into the woods to hide. It was the Thirty Years’ War all over again. Peace in the Palatinate would have to wait eleven more years, when in 1697, Louis XIV had finally quenched his appetite for destruction.
John felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and came face-to-face with the cage guard. The guard rested his hands on his hips.
“Is Dr. Antonelli coming or not?”
“Perhaps I’d better go look for him.”
“Yes. Perhaps you had better.”
SIXTEEN
DAVID REMOVED A BOOK from the shelf, opened it to a random page near the middle, and held it close to his face, breathing in the wonderful mustiness of age-old ideas. Then he sat down in a cubicle to read.
He did the same with every book he ever examined. He loved the smell.
It was his first visit to the University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library—or anywhere else on the campus, for that matter—in years. The history collection in the McKeldin stacks was as good as any within driving distance of Philadelphia, so he had made the trip despite misgivings about returning to the place where he had ditched his first choice of career.
If a book contained history, David believed, then the book itself was a part of history. An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s voice resonated in the reader’s head with the same words that had resonated in his own as he wrote them. He spoke to the reader from the past. What he had witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered would live forever.
You only had to turn a page to travel in time.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was born in Paris in 1605, after his family had moved there from Antwerp to escape religious persecution. His father was a map merchant, his uncle an engraver and printer to the king, and his brother a successful cartographer. This early exposure to maps fueled his dream of visiting the distant lands they portrayed.
Tavernier’s travels began early. At the age of twenty-two, he had already visited much of Europe and could speak several of its languages. Little did he know that his travels would make him the first European to visit the Indian diamond mines and document their recovery methods; that his slow, gentlemanly caravan would be the prize of robbers, his ships the target of pirates. Travel in the seventeenth century was often deadly, and Tavernier became one of the century’s most traveled men.
“If the first education is, as it were, a second birth, I am able to say that I came into the world with a desire to travel. The interviews which many learned men had daily with my father upon geographical matters, which he had the reputation of understanding well, and to which, young as I was, I listened with pleasure, inspired me at an early age with the desire to go to see some of the countries shown to me in the maps, which I could not then tire of gazing at.”
Tavernier’s sixth voyage to India, which included an audience with the Great Mogul, was the one that ensured him a place in the history books. The Great Mogul bought some of the famous traveler’s gemstones. Then, wanting him to stay for the annual birthday celebration, he promised to show him his personal collection. Akil Khan, chief of the jewel treasury, presented the stones in two ornately decorated wooden trays, after first inventorying them no less than three times in Tavernier’s presence. “For the Indians do everything with great circumspection and patience, and when they see any one who acts with precipitation or becomes angry, they gaze at him without saying anything and smile as if he were a madman.”
The principal stone in the collection was the one Tavernier dubbed the Great Mogul diamond, and he was the only westerner ever to lay eyes on it. “The first piece which Akil Khan placed in my hands was the great diamond, which is a round rose, very high at one side. At the basal margin it has a small notch and flaw inside. Its water is beautiful, and it weighs 319½ ratis, which are equal to 280 of our carats—the rati being 7/8th of our carat.”
Akil Khan allowed Tavernier to hold and inspect every stone in the Mogul’s collection, which included another three dozen or so diamonds cut into pears, tables, and roses, ranging from 7 to 55 carats: “All these stones are of first-class water, clean and of good form, and the most beautiful ever found.” The collection also included some ten natural pearls, the largest of which weighed 61 carats, as well as various pieces of jewelry set with rubies, emeralds, amethysts, and topazes.
“These, then, are the jewels of the Great Mogul, which he ordered to be shown to me as a special favour which he has never manifested to any other Frank; and I have held them all in my hand, and examined them with sufficient attention and leisure to be enabled to assure the reader that the description which I have just given is very exact and faithful …”
At the age of sixty-three, Tavernier finally came to the attention of Louis XIV. The king bought much of his remaining stock and made him a noble of the court. Finding himself one of the richest men in Europe, Tavernier purchased the Aubonne Barony in Switzerland, then retired to write Six Voyages through Europe into Asia, publishing the work in 1676. The book was a bestseller and was soon translated into English, German, and Italian.
Tavernier’s life wasn’t over. Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, offered the now-seventy-nine-year-old gentleman explorer the job of ambassador to India. By the time Tavernier sold his estate and prepared his affairs for the move, Frederick William’s plans had fallen through. Meanwhile, Tavernier had sent a nephew ahead to Persia with 222,000 francs worth of cargo—and never heard from either again.
Enraged, he launched his mysterious seventh voyage to the Orient via Russia—and disappeared from history.
David’s cubicle was stacked high with books. An afterword in one of them attracted his attention. It grudgingly related and tried to dispel the legend of the lost Tavernier stones.
The author tackled the job responsibly enough, noting that shortly after the alleged robbery near Florence, two men were seized in a drinking establishment and strung up for having had their way with a blacksmith’s daughter. The men were nameless; they had only been described as “the German rogues.” While standing on the gallows, having waited until the last possible moment, they offered information leading to “fabulous fortune” in exchange for their release. The authorities, eager to proceed with the execution, dropped the counterweights in the middle of their pleas.
Fabulous fortune! The quote didn’t prove anything, but it was yet another reason to believe a treasure hunt was justified. David checked the front of the book, an obscure history of India, and noted it had been published in 1911. According to the check-out sticker on the inside back cover, it had not left the library in more than thirty years.
David read with amusement that even to the present, people were sometimes caught on private property in and around Florence, digging for the lost Tavernier stones. They were treasure seekers so frenzied by fortune lust that they wildly misinterpreted the “clues”—or else they hoped random digging would do for them what random birthright had not, and sank their shovels into even the most unlikely places. In one or two instances, a homeowner heard noises coming from his basement and descended the stairs to find a team of treasure seekers digging a hole in the floor.
There was no doubt in David’s mind that Tavernier had begun—and completed—a seventh
voyage. The most valuable piece of information he had gained today was that the robbers were from Germany.
Could they have been from the Palatinate? Did Cellarius employ them? Or did Tavernier arrange the robbery himself, to defraud Louis XIV of his investment? Did he become a victim of his own sting?
One fact seemed likely: of all the places in the world where the lost Tavernier stones might await pick and spade, Florence, Italy, was not among them.
Before leaving the McKeldin Library, David stuffed the 1911 book into his pants and returned other relevant materials to the shelves in a way that no follow-on researcher would ever find them. He stepped outside into bright sunlight and paused among the building’s neoclassical columns until his eyes adjusted to the glare. Then he headed across the southwest quad toward Regents Drive.
His pace was slower than that of the students and faculty, who seemed enthusiastic about what they were doing, or at least about where they were going. He sensed the intellectual buzz that pervaded all college campuses: it was faintly audible, well-nigh tangible. He had been absent from the academic life so long he had forgotten the sensation.
He slowed down even more, allowing students and faculty to pass him, until it felt as though he had come to a complete standstill.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN ELEANOR HALL ENTERED the Chicago Tribune conference room, she didn’t bother slamming the door behind her. Such a display would have put her junior editors at ease—would have told them everything was normal. Instead, she calmly approached the head of the table and placed a copy of the previous day’s Louisville Courier Journal gently on its polished surface.
“Anyone care to make an observation?” she asked. Her tone was tranquil, soothing—designed to rattle and alarm the men sitting before her.
The front-page headline of the paper confronted the men in tall, compact letters: CHICAGO RUBY FITS PUZZLE. The entire front page carried an article about the Prairie State ruby, which the writer claimed was an integral part of the Tavernier treasure hunt.
The Tavernier Stones: A Novel Page 12