The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  “What difference does it make what time of day we dig for treasure?”

  “I wish I could say. It might just be superstition. Then again, these might not be instructions on when to dig, but rather when to look. In other words, maybe there’s another clue yet to be revealed, and it can only be revealed … at noon.”

  “That would be inconvenient,” Gebhardt said. “I do my best work at night.”

  The guide was rounding up his scattered tourists to lead them upstairs to the hydraulic presses. Blumenfeld and Gebhardt ambled over to where chattering people were gradually coalescing into a manageable herd.

  “The secret to any successful partnership is to never outlive your usefulness,” Blumenfeld told her young partner. “I suppose if we find the stones, I’ll be able to buy that amphora outright from this estate. You don’t know anyone who would care to taste-test it for me, do you?”

  Gebhardt shook his head slowly and deliberately.

  “Too bad. I may feel inclined to break it open anyway in celebration, to release the seventeenth-century toil and travail imprisoned within. To reunite them, you see, with old friends.”

  As the herd of tourists went up the stairs, one member asked the guide, “What’s the best color for red wine?”

  “Ruby,” he answered without hesitation. “Fine red wine is exactly the same color as a top-grade ruby.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ON SUNDAY THE FOURTEENTH of June, Gerd Pfeffer put on a jacket and tie and visited St. Jacobi Church.

  He entered one of the wooden confessionals, latched the door behind him, and knelt down on a padded stool. In the relative darkness he could hear murmurs coming from the other side as the priest gave penance to another confessor. After a few moments there was some rustling, then the distant sound of a door opening and closing. Finally a panel slid open before his face, revealing an intricately carved screen. Behind the screen was the vague shadow of a man.

  “Forgive me, Father,” Pfeffer began, “for I have sinned. It has been a long time since my last confession.”

  The shadowy figure remained silent. Pfeffer could only imagine the expression on his face. He heard what sounded like a soft chuckle.

  “What sins have you committed, my son?”

  “Lust, Father. And a whole lot of it.”

  “Lust … for a woman?”

  “No, for treasure.”

  “Ah. From what I hear, you’re far from alone.”

  “Far from alone? Funny you should put it that way, Father. I’ve never been lonelier in my life.”

  The figure on the other side of the screen leaned closer. “Gerd, you only come here after you’ve shot someone. I dread the day you tell me it was your wife.”

  “No, Father. My gun is silent forevermore.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. God is happy too.”

  “Tell me something, Father: how many songs did Solomon sing?”

  The priest replied without hesitation. “He spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five. First Book of Kings, chapter four, verse thirty-two.”

  “I bet you were first in your class at the seminary.”

  “As a matter of fact…I was.”

  “You could do me a special favor and not share this conversation with anyone else.”

  “But my son, are you not aware of the sanctity of the confessional?”

  Pfeffer received his penance and took a seat in the west gallery under the imposing Arp Schnitger organ. With four thousand pipes, sixty registers, and four keyboards, it was the largest baroque organ in northern Europe. It occurred to Pfeffer as he recited his Our Fathers and Hail Marys that he really ought to visit the church more often, even without having shot someone.

  The priest exited the center compartment of the confessional, found Pfeffer in the west gallery, and joined him in his pew. He was short and bald with a thick white beard. His eyes brimmed with the confidence and security possessed by men who knew their place in the world and happened to occupy it.

  Pfeffer silently handed him his notebook:Extend in the vltimate prone poƒition

  From the foote of the elevation …

  … baƒketh in fairie lighte

  Of Apollos reƒplendent apogee

  On the feƒtivall of his higheƒt aproche

  Then drink from the Sieve of Eratoƒthenes

  Sing more songes than Solomon

  And deƒcend to treaƒvre

  For the gates of Hell ƒhall not prevayle

  The priest read the text carefully. “‘And descend to treasure,’” he quoted. “Sounds like you’re going to do some digging.”

  “I hope the message is as straightforward as that.”

  “‘For the gates of hell shall not prevail,’” he continued. “Sounds like you may be digging into solid rock.” He turned and smiled mischievously.

  “Father, if you ever decide to leave the priesthood and become a detective—”

  “You,” the priest interrupted, “will be the first to know.”

  Barclay Zimmerman wondered what he was doing running a two-bit X-rated movie theater in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. No, that wasn’t true; he knew exactly why he was doing it. What he wondered was why he didn’t strike a match and turn the building into something more useful—say, a pile of carbon.

  He sat in the back row of the theater, pencil in hand, notebook resting on his lap. There was only one patron watching the movie, a freaky-looking guy sitting a dozen or so rows up.

  Wriggling flesh filled the screen. Individual figures were largely undifferentiable amid squirming limbs, bobbing heads, and wobbling breasts. Actors ad-libbed their lines for the most part—grunts and moans being hard to script. But Zimmerman was only vaguely aware of the distraction, as though the people next door had turned up their television too loud.

  “On the festival of his highest approach,” i.e., Apollo’s highest approach, could only mean summer solstice. At noon on that day, the longest day of the year, the sun would be higher in the sky than at any other time of the year.

  But wasn’t one day the same as another—as far as the sun was concerned? It rose in the east and set in the west. It didn’t change course, did it?

  No, it didn’t. But the earth was tilted on its rotational axis, so as the planet revolved around the sun, the path of the sun appeared to change. Its position in the sky was a function of the date and the observer’s latitude.

  Zimmerman had the date: summer solstice was going to take place June twenty-first, and the event, being a natural one, was independent of any calendar manipulations that might have occurred since Cellarius’s time. Man could move Christmas if he wanted to, but he couldn’t move the equinoxes and solstices.

  Zimmerman unfolded a map of Germany and found Idar-Oberstein. During summer solstice, the sun would be directly above the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude. Idar-Oberstein was about 49.7 degrees north of the equator, or 26.2 degrees farther north than the Tropic of Cancer. Therefore, the angle of the sun on summer solstice would be 26.2 degrees less than vertical, or about 64 degrees above the horizon.

  Assuming the premise about Idar-Oberstein was correct, something was going to happen there at noon on June twenty-first while the sun shined down from 64 degrees high in the sky. Something that presumably had been happening at noon on every summer solstice for the past three hundred years.

  Whatever it was, it was somehow related to prime numbers: “Then drink from the sieve of Eratosthenes” was the follow-on line in the cipher. Since one could not literally drink from a sieve, Zimmerman interpreted the “drink” part to be figurative. The Sieve of Eratosthenes was a mechanical method of separating the prime numbers from the rest of the natural numbers.

  Eratosthenes was a third-century BC Greek cartographer distinguished by having been the first to measure the circumference of the earth. A prime number was any natural number, greater than one, that was divisible only by one and itself. The “sieve” Eratosthenes invented w
as really a grid: he made it by laying out the natural numbers, typically in rows of ten, and striking out those divisible by some number other than one and itself.

  Zimmerman didn’t think the sieve method itself was significant. Just that whatever was going to happen in Idar-Oberstein at noon on the summer solstice was going to involve prime numbers. And he didn’t have a clue what it was.

  He brushed the hair out of his eyes and looked up at the screen to gauge the progress of the movie. They were still going at it. He couldn’t tell which limbs belonged to which torsos. Normally a movie would end soon after a climax, but in these kinds of movies …

  The theater’s lone patron, sitting halfway toward the front, had an unnaturally rigid look about him. Zimmerman hoped that, if the man was doing what he appeared to be doing, he didn’t leave anything on the seat cushion.

  He ran upstairs to the projection room and checked a wall calendar. Summer solstice was just seven days away.

  That afternoon, John drove to Philadelphia and picked up Sarah at her house on Volta Street. She stepped squeamishly into the front passenger seat, taking care not to rest her arms on the arm rests or touch any other part of the dilapidated vehicle. For his own part, John was fighting down a rising panic over what the oil temperature gauge on the dashboard indicated.

  “What’s causing that noise?” Sarah asked.

  “You mean the grinding noise? Like the engine’s about to fall apart?”

  “Yeah, that noise.”

  “The engine’s about to fall apart.”

  “Oh. Has it always made that noise?”

  “No, it didn’t when it was new.”

  The car limped into Chinatown, where John parked it on Race Street. The two then walked to the condemnable brick building between Watts and Juniper that served as a police dispatch station and makeshift jail. Upstairs, they stood and waited until David was brought out. He brushed past them without acknowledgement.

  “You’re welcome,” John said, when they were back on the street.

  “I take it you want me to thank you for picking me up.”

  “It’s the courteous thing to do. We could have left you up there.”

  “You came to get me because you need me. I was happy where I was. The food was … exotic.”

  “Then why are you leaving with us?”

  “They made me. There’s a funny rule in these parts that you can’t stay in jail if you don’t belong in jail. After two nights in these luxury accommodations,” he jabbed his thumb at the soot-covered building, “they released me for lack of evidence, the stolen ring being on Sarah’s finger, not mine. So tell me,” he inspected each of them in turn, “why are the two of you picking me up together?”

  “You’ve been missing staff meetings,” John answered.

  “Are we conducting one now?”

  “Hop in,” John said. “We’re going for a walk in the park.”

  He drove to the west entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the three walked down the steps into the Azalea Garden. They bought soft drinks from a vendor and sat on the bank of the Schuylkill.

  “Have you been reading the papers?” John asked.

  “No,” David answered. “I suppose you’re going to tell me the press got the keyword.”

  “A newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas, broke the story this morning, and it’s all over the media. Within hours, everyone in the country will know the code.”

  “Do you have a quarter?”

  “Why?”

  “Do you have one or don’t you?”

  John produced one. David handed him a crayon and told him to make a secret identifiable mark on the quarter. John wrote the letter “J.” Without looking at it, David wrapped the quarter in a handkerchief and asked John to verify its presence by feeling it through the cloth. Then he removed a ball of yarn from his pocket and dropped it into one of the empty soft drink cups.

  “Abracadabra,” David said, opening the handkerchief to show that the quarter had vanished. “Any idea where it’s gone?”

  “No doubt into your pocket,” John replied.

  “Wrong.” He gave John the ball of yarn and told him to unravel it. John did so. A small matchbox, secured with rubber bands, appeared at its center. Inside the matchbox was the quarter—letter J and all.

  “How did it get there?” John asked. Although he didn’t really care; after spending time alone with Sarah, David’s presence seemed like an intrusion. He hoped David wouldn’t detect the attraction. The mutual attraction.

  “Simple. I put it there right after you marked it. I’ve been practicing this trick for two days. The jailers figured I wouldn’t be able to hang myself with a ball of yarn or dig my way out with an empty matchbox—both of which occurred to me, nevertheless. You know, it’s customary to applaud the magician at the successful conclusion of his magic trick.”

  “Well done,” John said unenthusiastically.

  “Thank you.”

  “I must admit, though, that I find magic tricks rather frivolous at this particular time.”

  “Right. I figured you might. But ponder this rhetorical question: how are we going to get the lost Tavernier stones back into the United States, if and when we find them?”

  John sat quietly next to David and Sarah on the riverbank, gazing out at the slow, serene waters of the Schuylkill, pondering David’s rhetorical question. That he and David had begun to polarize, perhaps beyond repair, was obvious. He didn’t think David was taking the project seriously anymore. And he felt that David himself knew it: that he had exhausted his contribution to the extent of his expertise and was waiting for John to come up with a solution. John wondered whether a collaboration was such a good idea after all. But then, there was the girl. Get rid of David, and you get rid of the girl.

  It was the girl who broke the awkward silence.

  “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “why Cellarius bothered to make a treasure map, if in fact that’s what it is.”

  David shrugged exaggeratedly and said, “When you bury treasure, you leave a record of where you buried it.”

  “But why?” Sarah insisted. “If he buried the treasure, or if someone else buried it and he happened to know where, he didn’t need to document the location. He had nobody to leave treasure to. Why go through the trouble of making a map and enciphering mysterious instructions? What would the point be, other than amusement?”

  John plucked a weed from the grass and stuck it in his mouth. “Maybe,” he speculated, “Cellarius involved himself with the cutter and the distiller’s wife long enough to know how and where they hid the stones. They killed him, but not before he recorded—as a kind of insurance policy, or as a study in irony, or even because he knew in advance he was doomed—clues on his last map. Think of it as a note in a bottle. Maybe the map and ‘mysterious instructions’ were, as you suppose, solely for his own amusement. Maybe he was just … being a cartographer.”

  “You just pronounced a lot of maybes,” Sarah said. “Maybe we should go to Idar-Oberstein and start poking around.”

  “No,” John said, “it’s too early. We’d only be wandering aimlessly.”

  David laughed. “He’s right: we can wander aimlessly here as well as there, and save ourselves the price of a plane ticket.”

  “Wandering aimlessly may accurately characterize what you’re doing,” John shot back. “It’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re the cartographer. You not only know where to go, you can tell me where to go, too.”

  “Guys, guys,” Sarah said. “We have a job to do.”

  They sat quietly for a minute. Finally David said, “Okay. Let’s review what we’ve learned since the last time.”

  He sat up in the grass and raised his knees to his chest. “We’ve deciphered Cellarius’s message, and it speaks directly to the existence of treasure. We no longer have to worry about following a path that can only lead to a dead end.”

  “We have a likely motive,” John a
dded. “Cellarius’s wife died during Louis XIV’s invasion of Holland.”

  “And evidence of a theft,” David continued, “the last-minute confession of two Germans hanged in Florence after Tavernier’s disappearance. The lost Tavernier stones exist—or at least they did at one time. We have to work under the assumption that they weren’t all recut, that they’re stashed somewhere.”

  John plucked a fresh weed to replace the one he had chewed. “The question is, where?”

  “I still think we should go to Idar-Oberstein and have a look,” Sarah said. “Measure Cellarius’s height from whatever landmark we find called ‘the elevation,’ and start digging.”

  “We aren’t sure a man’s height is the measuring stick,” David said contemptuously. “And if it is, we aren’t sure the man in question is Cellarius. We have no idea what ‘the elevation’ means. We don’t know what basks in fairy light, how prime numbers come into play, or the significance of a thousand and five, the number of Solomon’s songs. There are too many things we simply don’t know. Until we make more progress—a lot more progress—we would be wasting our time and money traveling to Germany. And we would be cutting ourselves off from some valuable research resources.”

  “Columbus was wrong,” Sarah countered. “He sailed for the West Indies, not the Americas. Edison was wrong, too. He once tried bamboo as a filament for his light bulb.”

  David stood up, brushing the loose grass from his backside.

  John allowed his eyes to rove briefly above Sarah’s knees. The way she sat in the grass with her legs crossed and her skirt bunched up in her lap exposed the insides of her thighs. And for an instant, as she shifted to a more comfortable position, he glimpsed the white flash of underwear. He looked up at her face and was startled to find her watching him.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” David asked.

  “Yes,” John answered—before realizing David was showing them a wallet-sized photograph of Hildegard Weinbrenner’s oil portrait. David’s curious smile told John he was aware of the fauxpas.

  “The source of the Prairie State ruby,” David said. “This is the woman who passed the stone to her son, who passed it to his son, and so on, until it ended up in the Field Museum.”