The Tavernier Stones: A Novel

by Stephen Parrish

  “Tomorrow is also Sunday,” John reminded her. “And a mass is scheduled from eleven to noon. The church will be full.”

  “So much the better. There are lots of other people searching, and more than a few of them have gotten far enough to identify Idar-Oberstein as the likely location. Tomorrow we’ll see how many show up in the church. We need to keep our eyes peeled for anyone who looks interested in more than the mass.”

  “Better safe than sucking hind tit,” David quipped. He looked directly into John’s eyes. “Or any tit at all.”

  Gerd Pfeffer was in his pension on the Kirchweg, reading about Eratosthenes. The sieve was the piece of Cellarius’s puzzle that continued to give him problems.

  Pfeffer was also doing his best not to reach for the telephone and check up on his wife. His insecurities prompted the desire to do so; his ego dampened it.

  There was something cartographically odd about Eratosthenes’s world map. Rather than draw his parallels and meridians at regular intervals, he drew them so they would pass through major geographical features. A parallel went east-west through Alexandria, for example. He called it “the Parallel of Alexandria.” Others went through Rhodes and Thule, but none appeared at ten degrees north and south latitude, or twenty degrees, and so on.

  Likewise, the meridians: one ran north-south through Alexandria, but none appeared at equal distances east or west of it. Thus there was no systematic geometric grid on which to locate all geographical features.

  Cellarius himself had done something similarly odd on his Palatinate map. Although he spaced his parallels and meridians at regular intervals, he didn’t space them discretely north of the equator or east of a prime meridian. He didn’t even label them. The result was an arbitrary graticule superimposed on the terrain, as if Descartes himself had happened upon an ungridded map and wished to study its sinuous features as analytic functions. Pfeffer suspected this aspect of the map was somehow related to the Sieve of Eratosthenes. But how?

  He snatched up the telephone and dialed his home number. No one answered. Sometimes the only way to affect justice, he decided, was outside the context of the law.

  Meanwhile, Frieda Blumenfeld perched on her second-floor balcony, waiting for Mannfred Gebhardt to show up. If she stood on her toes, she could just see the Volkspark and the rose garden next to it, for which Rosenstockstrasse was named. The garden’s sculpted hedges and grand old oak trees shaded colonies of mosses homesteading its flagstones and shallow steps.

  She watched as Gebhardt approached on foot. He passed the rose garden, oblivious to the roses and to her presence on the balcony above him. His gait was carefree; when he reached her house, he sprang up the front porch steps with uncharacteristic flourish. And there wasn’t the usual hesitation of several seconds before ringing the doorbell. He must have gotten laid, Blumenfeld reasoned.

  She went downstairs to the living room while Hannelore showed Gebhardt in. As he entered the living room, he handed her a tan envelope. She noticed he was wearing an amethyst crystal pendant.

  “What’s in the envelope?” she asked.

  “The genealogy report you asked for.”

  She handed it back. “What does it say?”

  “She already had one son named Richard, who was five years old when she was convicted. The Weinbrenner name is, in fact, still common in Idar-Oberstein. The baby she was carrying at the time, also a boy, was adopted by an Anabaptist clan in the Palatinate, most of whom eventually emigrated to America.”

  “Really.”

  “Pennsylvania, America, to be specific. Weinbrenner named the baby before she died. Rather than use her own last name, she gave it the name Graf, apparently in honor of the father’s profession. Johannes Graf began a dynasty of sorts in central Pennsylvania, a dynasty that thrives to this day.”

  “Interesting. Thank you. Now,” she rubbed her hands together briskly, “some wine. To celebrate my last day of poverty.” She opened a cabinet and scanned the rows of bottles.

  “You still haven’t told me why you needed the information.”

  “I was curious. As I am about that pendant you’re wearing.”

  Gebhardt shrugged. “Just something I found.”

  “In Idar-Oberstein?”

  He inspected his fingernails. “Could be.”

  “You know, a twelve-year-old girl is missing down there.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. Her picture was in the paper. Erika. Pretty little thing. Looks remarkably like someone else you knew … intimately. The whole town is acting as though the witches have returned.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “As a matter of fact, Erika went missing right around the time you were there doing your genealogy research.”

  “Forty thousand others were there too, Frieda.”

  “So they were.”

  “What do you say we just focus on our mission tomorrow and leave my personal life off the agenda?”

  Blumenfeld smiled. “Forgive me.” She removed a bottle from the cabinet. “I’ve been saving this Pouilly-Fumé for a special occasion. Of course, it really should be consumed with some oily fish. Herring or mackerel. Or,” she turned to Gebhardt, “do you just order ‘white wine’ with your ‘fish’?”

  “I wouldn’t mind sampling…a glass of that.”

  “One ought to eat the foods that are famous in a given wine region whenever one drinks that region’s wine. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted fried eel from the Gironde with a Bordeaux. Heaven! And here we sit in Mainz.”

  “I notice you only poured one glass.”

  “Oh, my dear Gebhardt, you wouldn’t appreciate this. Do go downstairs and get yourself a bottle of something from the Mosel.” She chuckled. “Give me one more day, and there’ll be some poisoned wine down there you’ll have to be careful not to grab by mistake.”

  In his hotel room on the south side of the Marktplatz, Barclay Zimmerman recalled Tavernier’s famous words once more: No. 4 represents a diamond which I bought at Ahmadabad for one of my friends. It weighed 178 ratis, or 157¼ of our carats.

  Accompanying the note in Tavernier’s travel account was a drawing of a smooth, irregularly shaped diamond. Next to it was a drawing of the same diamond in its new incarnation, after Tavernier had it cut. Now shaped like an egg with a large natural at one end and covered with numerous flat, polygonal facets, it weighed 94½ carats and was reportedly flawless, or “of perfect water,” in Tavernier’s words.

  … which I bought at Ahmadabad for one of my friends …

  That’s as far as the record would go. Stones purporting to be the Ahmadabad, including a pear-shaped specimen weighing almost 79 carats, were eagerly sought and traded by collectors hoping reliable provenance would someday come to light.

  Zimmerman was convinced the genuine Ahmadabad was somewhere within walking distance of where he stood. The alternative was unacceptable.

  He looked out his window at the Marktplatz. He could see the Felsenkirche towering high above. Tucked under his arm was a Chicago Tribune newspaper. Its front page article named the Felsenkirche as the probable location of the lost Tavernier stones, based on a reference to the Bible found in Cellarius’s code. It pointed out a glaring discrepancy in Cellarius’s depiction of the steeple. X, the newspaper claimed, marked the spot.

  Zimmerman watched the crowd in the Marktplatz. It seemed to grow by the minute. The whole world was about to converge on Idar-Oberstein.

  John waited in his room for David and Sarah to return from what they called “window shopping.” Despite his insistence that his knowledge of German made him the best shopping companion, David had stubbornly refused to listen, and he and Sarah had left without him.

  He paced the room, which was only long enough to allow four steps in one direction before he had to turn around again. After a few minutes, he realized he was behaving like a caged animal, and stopped.

  He looked at himself in the full-length closet mirror. His hair had gotten shaggy in recent
weeks. And a cigarette dangled from between his fingers, an innovation adopted only yesterday, renewed from the “wild oats” period of his youth. He watched his image in the mirror as he took a drag without inhaling and blew the smoke back out in a thin, bluish-gray stream. It was like a scene from a movie. He was not sure he recognized the man in the mirror.

  When he finally heard two pairs of feet coming up the stairs, he went into the hallway to greet them. David and Sarah were both smiling.

  “That took you long enough,” John said.

  “We got distracted.” David reached for Sarah’s hand and held it up for John to see. She was wearing a large diamond ring.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” John stared at David in disbelief. “You robbed a jewelry store?”

  “‘Robbed’ is a strong word. We found the most feebleminded salesman this side of the Atlantic and couldn’t pass up the chance.”

  “Don’t you realize how stupid that is? We’re looking for the greatest cache of gemstones in history, and you risk it all to steal a lousy ring?”

  “There was no risk. We knew what we were doing. And all’s well that ends well.” David turned his back on John and unlocked his door; as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

  Sarah glanced quickly from one to the other, then followed David into their room.

  “Don’t blow me off like that,” John said. “Your behavior is—”

  “No!” David exploded. He spun around and returned to the doorway. “Your behavior is what we should all be concerned about. Look at yourself! We’re not searching for the Holy Grail, for Christ’s sake. We’re searching for some missing rocks. And until you get a grip on yourself, it’s you who are risking this operation, not me.”

  John looked past David at Sarah, who avoided eye contact. “By all means,” he said, “don’t hold anything back.”

  David stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, leaving Sarah alone in the room.

  “You wanna talk to me, farm boy? Talk.”

  “You treat her like property,” John said.

  “The question is not how I treat her, but rather whose property she is.”

  John laughed. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “That’s not all: until she becomes your property, I suggest you treat her as though she were someone else’s.”

  They glared at each other for a few seconds. John finally broke it off; the expression on David’s face was not at all yielding.

  “What Sarah does with her body,” John said, “and with her life, is up to her. I will neither encourage nor discourage her.”

  “So be it. But just keep in mind, Amishman, where you come from—and where she comes from. She would do no better in your world that you would in hers—than you are doing in hers. If you feel like a fish out of water, imagine putting a bonnet on her head and putting her to work in one of your barns or fields.”

  “You speak as though I’ll be returning to the farm—”

  “Well, won’t you?”

  “—and that I intend to take her with me.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  John leaned heavily against the wall. “I don’t know.”

  “Until you know, be careful what you do. You think I mistreat her, but actually I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to her. If I hadn’t taken her under my wing, she’d be turning tricks in Lower Kensington right now. So be careful not only what you do, but also what advice you give—to me or to her.”

  Afterwards, alone in his room, John looked at himself in the mirror again.

  Had he changed that much? Enough to alarm the people around him? At North Star, some of his fellow cartographers had nicknamed him Clark Kent, and he had accepted the gesture good-naturedly because he was, after all, compared to most of them, rather mild-mannered. Now he was driven by a need to avenge and exonerate an obscure seventeenth-century mapmaker, a need that hardly characterized mild-mannered men.

  Avenge? Exonerate? Where had those words come from?

  He sat down at his small writing table and pulled the telephone closer. His instincts told him it was time to make a call, but he didn’t know which of two numbers to dial first. One was the restaurant where his sister Rebecca worked as a waitress. The other was the airline—to ask for a seat assignment.

  The lost Tavernier stones still belonged to Cellarius. They would continue to belong to Cellarius until found by someone else. It occurred to him that if he abandoned the project now, David and Sarah might yet find the stones, but at least he, John, wouldn’t be party to the effort.

  Sarah. If he left Germany, he left Sarah. David was right: they each came from worlds the other could never enter. But last night had been transcendental; if two people who shared such an experience didn’t belong together, no two people did. And yet, to what extent was he confusing genuine affection with mere sexual desire? And did either of them have to go so far as to enter another world just to enjoy each other’s company?

  He was not aware how much time had passed when he heard the soft knock at his door. He suddenly realized he was sitting in darkness.

  Without waiting for an answer, Sarah opened the door and entered the room. John watched her figure cross the dusky space, peel off clothes, and climb into bed. He undressed as well, got under the covers, and felt her long, bare legs press warmly against his own.

  “Does David know?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She gave him a slow, wet kiss on the ear.

  “What does he think about it?”

  “Whatever he wants to think about it.”

  “Why do you stay with him?”

  She pressed her lips against his neck. “He’s a genius. He could be anything he wants, even a professor. All he needs is a little nudging. I intend to marry him, you know.”

  “You … you do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he think about that?”

  “He’s getting used to the idea. As we speak.”

  She kissed his chest and worked her way down. “I want to make you happy, John. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  IT HAD TO BE the clearest day of the year. It couldn’t get any clearer, for there wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky, only a vast hemispherical vault of blue. The sun climbed steadily and authoritatively across the vault like a judge entering an arena.

  Summer solstice. All rise.

  John marched wordlessly alongside David and Sarah down the Hauptstrasse toward the Felsenkirche. Other visitors and townspeople, dressed in their Sunday best and keeping just as silent, filed alongside. As the gathering crowd neared the Marktplatz, it was joined by streams of devout Catholics and treasure hunters trickling in from hotels and residential districts elsewhere in the city.

  Many of the rock and jewelry shops were open, a Sunday tradition in Idar-Oberstein. But John saw few visitors patronizing them. Shopkeepers stood in the entrances, wringing their hands, gazing wistfully at the brilliant white church high above them.

  People streamed in from both directions on the Hauptstrasse. They choked the Burggasse where it entered the Marktplatz from the west. They broke formation and hurried across the open market square.

  A bottleneck formed at the bottom of the Kirchweg. David waited for a gap in the flow of people, then began trudging up, with Sarah and John close behind. Climbers in poor shape stopped on some of the path’s nineteen landings to catch their breath, rest on benches provided for them, and smile sheepishly at the able-bodied passing them by. Employees of rock shops lining the way peered out through display windows to marvel and shake their heads at the swelling train of people.

  On the platform at the top of the Kirchweg, the train bunched up in the amphitheater-shaped space and pressed forward to wedge its way into the tunnel. No bells were ringing, and John knew why: bells hadn’t rung in Oberstein since the seventeenth century. Eye contact was rare and brief; everyone seemed suspicious of everyone else, and neighbors did
not appear to know each other this day.

  The three had arrived early enough to find places on the outside of a third-row pew, beneath the stained glass windows on the south wall. John dipped his fingers in the basin of holy water and made the sign of the cross. David and Sarah hesitantly did the same. But when John bowed to the altar and genuflected to the tabernacle, David and Sarah merely took their seats.

  The church continued to fill amid the sound of shuffling feet and an occasional cough until no seats remained. John surveyed the nave; the space between the back pew and the entrance was becoming crowded with standing figures, their hands clasped in front of them. Some fidgeted, perhaps because they were in a church for the first time in years. Some no doubt wondered whether they would be able to stand elbow-to-elbow like that for the entire hour of the service.

  Some, their eyes darting from the stained glass windows to the altar, from the tiled stone floor to the balcony, were clearly present for reasons other than holy mass.

  John could tell the balcony was full; he heard murmuring and the flapping of leaflets that served better as fans than guides. The atmosphere was heavy with the rustle of clothing, the muffled grate of clearing throats, and the sibilant hush of whispered conversations. The people were as self-conscious of the noises they made as the appearances they gave. Most studiously avoided eye contact, as though they were in a whorehouse rather than a church. They seemed uncomfortably reflective and introspective.

  What unconfessed sins caused such behavior? John wondered. Something from their distant pasts? Time spent absent from the church?

  He looked at his watch. It was exactly eleven o’clock.

  The organ suddenly piped up, and a choir in the balcony began a hymn. The seated congregation rose to its feet.

  Zu dir, o Gott, er-he-ben wir

  die Seele mit Ver-trau-en.

  Dein Volk er-freu-et sich in dir,

  wollst gnä-dig nie-der-schau-en.