… baƒketh in fairie lighte
Of Apollo’s 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
“Well, at least now we’ve confirmed what ‘Apollo’s resplendent apogee’ means. And it’s pretty obvious what Cellarius meant by ‘fairy light.’”
“I should have known that one to begin with,” David confessed. “There’s a mineral called staurolite, an iron aluminum silicate, that commonly occurs as X-shaped twin crystals—as skewed crosses. The more common name for the mineral is ‘fairy cross.’”
“And we know why the treasure hunter in 1858 failed,” Sarah said. “The sky was overcast during solstice; it had been drizzling for nearly a month. He never saw the image of the cross descend on the wall.”
“That leaves us with the Sieve of Eratosthenes and the songs of Solomon,” John said. He looked out the window again. “Any ideas about those?”
“The sieve means the solution has something to do with prime numbers.” David stood up and walked to the door. “That we already know.”
“And the songs of Solomon?”
David opened the door and motioned for Sarah to follow him. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“It appears we have competition.”
“Right. Which is why we have to go tonight—as soon as it gets dark.”
“Don’t we want to wait until after midnight?” John suggested. “Until as late as possible?”
“No,” David said, “by then it’ll be rush hour in the church.” He turned to Sarah. “Are you sure it was Zimmerman you saw in the crowd? Absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. Bad hair and all.”
“Just who is this Zimmerman person?” John asked.
David ushered Sarah out and reached for the doorknob.
“Trouble.”
Gerd Pfeffer waited in his pension for the cover of night, playing with prime numbers. The phone had not rung. Not once. His boss might have thought to call, but then again, Pfeffer was on leave and his boss might have been sparing him the nuisance. A subordinate might have wanted to get in touch, but surely Pfeffer’s gruff telephone etiquette would have daunted him. Who else? His mother? Perhaps, if she weren’t already dead.
There was no point wondering if his wife had any inclination to dial. The phone, an old Princess model still popular in hotels and pensions, sat motionless and silent on the table as though deep in hibernation. It wasn’t going to ring.
Pfeffer dressed in all black clothes. He blackened his face with a military camouflage stick, set his alarm for safety’s sake, and laid down on the bed to wait for dark.
He knew where the image of the fairy cross had landed, but he didn’t know where the treasure was. The image was supposed to have pinpointed an entrance to the chambers beneath the church. Instead it had stopped above a coffin. Still, he predicted that if others had solved the puzzle, they would go after the treasure tonight.
Therefore, so would he.
Mannfred Gebhardt rode from Mainz to Idar-Oberstein in Frieda Blumenfeld’s BMW, with Blumenfeld at the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road, her mouth clamped shut. Had she intended a successful, uneventful evening, one that would end with the two of them splitting the loot, separating the lost Tavernier stones into two piles, one for her, one for him, she would have spent the time underway bending his ear in preparation, scolding him for his deficiencies, warning him not to outlive his usefulness. Instead she was silent.
Which meant she had some other dénouement in mind.
So did he.
Barclay Zimmerman loaded his 9mm handgun. It had been easy to get. All you had to do was ask the town drunks. For five euros, enough to help a drunk make it through the night, you could have any information you needed.
Zimmerman found a group of them huddled over a case of beer at the train station. Half an hour later, he was in a dingy apartment overlooking the Nahe River, examining German police surplus handguns and miscellaneous lots of ammunition. Fifteen minutes after that, he was the most recent in a long line of owners of a Heckler & Koch P7 and two clips of 9mm ammo.
Twenty minutes later, he was back in his room.
Feinstein deserved a bullet. And no one would complain, not the Philadelphia law enforcement community, nor the gemology industry, nor even Sarah Sainte-James. Sarah deserved far better treatment than Feinstein gave her.
Still, Zimmerman had to admit, they looked natural together when they came out of the church. They looked like a pair.
Freeman, he reminded himself again. Freeman.
Back in his own room in the Pearl Hotel, David calmed himself by practicing the magic trick that would get the lost Tavernier stones through airport security and past the customs officials. Occasionally he glanced up at Sarah, who was still leafing through research materials. Their eyes met once, briefly, communicated nothing, then drifted apart.
He was hungry. It was what he hated most about hotels; you couldn’t just go into the kitchen and make yourself a snack like you could at home.
The trick he practiced was a standard production box, using a shoebox he had found in a pile of boxes behind the hotel. He pulled a table away from the wall, set the shoebox in the middle of it, and placed its lid on the near side, next to the edge.
He held up the box for an imaginary audience to confirm it was empty. He did the same with the lid, to prove nothing was attached to it—nothing visible to the audience. Then he fitted the lid to the box.
Displaying the closed box from every angle, he shrugged to the imaginary audience as if to say, “It’s just an empty shoebox.” But when he set the box back down, opened it, and reached inside, his fist came out filled with diamonds.
Or would, if everything went as planned.
It was a simple trick, but most tricks were, and it would get non-metallic objects through airport security and anything past customs.
He only needed some black felt to finish preparing the contraption, and he had already bought it from a craft shop downtown. He would sew a bag out of the felt and attach it to the lid.
Now all that remained was to go out and find some really big diamonds to put in the bag.
In his room across the hall, John ground out a half-finished cigarette, then immediately lit another. He was smoking too much; the cigarettes made him feel dizzy and left a filthy taste in his mouth.
He missed Pennsylvania. He missed Rebecca. For the first time since leaving the farm, he even missed hooks and eyes.
He retrieved a piece of folded-up cardboard from the bottom of his suitcase and unfolded it carefully on his bed. It was full of square and rectangular holes. When open and flat, it had the same dimensions as Cellarius’s last map.
It was the clue John was still withholding from David: Cellarius had not, in fact, placed hills on his Palatinate map arbitrarily. Instead, he had centered terrain peaks on grid squares numbered 9, 13, 19, 21 … corresponding to the prime numbers greater than 1005, the number of Solomon’s songs: 1009, 1013, 1019, 1021 …
John had drawn a duplicate graticule on a sheet of cardboard and cut every one of those squares out of it, creating fifty-four open windows. When held up to the light or laid down over some other pattern, possibly another map, the sheet acted as a locator grille.
Locating what, he did not yet know.
He heard David and Sarah’s door open, followed by muffled conversation in the hallway. He quickly folded the cardboard sheet back up and stuffed it into his shirt.
There was a knock at the door, and he opened it.
David and Sarah were holding hands. “It’s time to go to church,” David said.
John picked up a bag of tools from the floor next to his bed, swung it over his shoulder, and followed them down the hall to the stairs.
“‘Yea, the
y made their hearts as an adamant stone,’” he quoted into the darkened stairwell. “‘Therefore came a great wrath from the lord of hosts.’”
THIRTY-THREE
THE STARS WERE OUT in such numbers, they seemed to have gathered to witness a spectacle. The night sky was a navigator’s dream. It struck John that after years of working with maps, he saw the world through a cartographic lens: azimuth, grid coordinate, navigation by the stars.
Breaking into the church was by now routine. They had arrived via the Burggasse rather than the Marktplatz to avoid surveillance; no one could stake out every approach. David made picking the gate lock look easy, and there was no bantering among the three while he worked. They trudged silently and businesslike up the tunnel steps.
In contrast to the teeming, restive ceremony they had attended that morning, the interior of the church felt lifeless and hollow. And yet watchful.
It was the paintings, John decided. They were all portraits: angels, apostles, holy family. And of course they all had eyes. And even the eyes that were averted seemed to watch the three visitors loiter in the center aisle, as if to say, “Well?”
The three visitors continued to loiter there, treading a wash of silence rippled only by their own shoes scuffing on the stone floor.
They had wrapped their flashlight lenses in red cellophane to reduce the risk of detection, but they had not anticipated the effect the tint would have on the mood in the nave. The red glow and the roving circles and ellipses reminded John of artificial theater lighting. He experienced a brief moment of stage fright before an unforgiving audience of portraits, coffins, and painted glass, inanimate objects that had witnessed so many scenarios played out on the altar’s stage in centuries past that they were surely dubious about tonight’s performance.
Finally Sarah said, “Well?”
David walked around the front left pew and approached the sarcophagus. John followed him and placed his bag of tools on the floor next to it. Sarah, clearly not wanting to be left behind in the aisle, hurried to keep up with the two men. All three stared at the cipher engraved on the sarcophagus lid:
“What the hell does it mean?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” John said. “But it looks like witchcraft to me.”
“It’s an amulet,” Sarah whispered, “to guard against sorcery. It’s never been deciphered.”
John reached down and removed a crowbar from the bag.
“I don’t think we’ll need any of that stuff,” David said. “Here, take the other end, help me lift the lid.”
It took them several minutes of jerking and straining before they discovered that a natural seal had formed between the two pieces of sandstone. David picked up the crowbar and used it to work his way around the lid, loosening the weld caused by centuries of chemical deposition.
“You’re the religious one,” he said. “You want to say something before we open it?”
John made the sign of the cross. “May God forgive me for what I am about to do.”
“Assuming,” David added, “that he has already forgiven you for busting into his house and hacking at it with garden tools.”
“I’d feel a world better if today weren’t Sunday.”
“It’s funny you should say that. Stonewall Jackson, a very religious man, fought most of his battles on Sundays.”
“And he, a cold-blooded killer! I feel so much better.”
David set the crowbar back down and cracked his knuckles. John rubbed the palms of his hands together. Sarah took a couple of steps backwards while the two men bent over and got a good grip on the corners of the lid.
“Three, two, one … go!”
They strained and grunted, and the lid came loose, making horrible screeching noises as it slid across the top of the sarcophagus. They shuffled a few steps away and dropped the sandstone slab on the floor. It crashed thunderously, breaking into several large pieces.
The trio froze, waiting for the echoes in the nave to fade. John imagined the noise reverberating through the rock bluff and being heard by everyone in the town below. After a few seconds that seemed like minutes, all was still again, and no response came from the world outside.
David removed his flashlight from his back pocket and directed its beam into the open sarcophagus. “Come have a look at this,” he said.
John and Sarah joined him and peered inside. The red light illuminated a worn stone staircase that wound deep into the rock. At the bottom of the staircase, at the limit of the flashlight’s beam, an arched entrance led into an open space. No door blocked the entrance, but the darkness beyond was even more forbidding.
“I never really believed it,” Sarah said, “until this moment.”
David took a deep breath, then stepped over the side of the sarcophagus. “It’s now or never.”
Sarah followed behind him, and John brought up the rear.
The walls of the access were rough hewn; whoever had cut them had made a modest attempt at an arch structure but had deviated wherever the rock became too resistant. As John descended behind the red glow of three flashlights, the temperature gradually dropped and goose pimples formed on his arms. He ducked to avoid spider webs, some clearly as old as the access itself. The air was dank and musty and had a stale odor consistent with three hundred years of little or no disturbance.
As they neared the bottom of the staircase, the walls became spotty with moisture. The sound of steady dripping emanated from somewhere far below.
Sarah reached behind herself and took John’s hand. He gripped it firmly.
“I hope,” David said over his shoulder, “that if God decides to punish you in the next hour or so, he waits until the rest of us get out of the way.”
Blumenfeld and Gebhardt had reached the tunnel gate and found it latched and locked. Blumenfeld looked up at the stained glass windows, now dark within their Gothic arches. All was quiet; there wasn’t so much as a breeze to disturb the calm. The stars shined so clearly, even the convection currents must have stood down for the night. No evidence existed that she and Gebhardt were following in the footsteps of others, which is why she concluded they were.
“Time to make yourself useful,” she told her partner.
Gebhardt knelt down before the gate, removed a tool wallet from his back pocket, and shined his flashlight on the lock. “Scheiße!” he said. “It’s been picked already.”
Blumenfeld’s heart raced; the game was on. But it was best, she decided, not to excite her young companion. “Take it easy,” she reassured him. “They have arrived, but they have not yet left. So far, everything is going according to script.”
“I hope you know the script,” Gebhardt said, “because the story looks a little open-ended to me.”
“Naturally. But from this point on, we really should speak only when necessary.”
They went silently into the tunnel, closing and relatching the gate behind them.
Blumenfeld knew the script. She had it memorized.
Farther down on the Kirchweg, Pfeffer was in bed but still awake, thinking about crimes, detective work, puzzles. He’d never really solved a great crime, certainly nothing that would get him into the history books. The Cellarius murder was a great crime. Pfeffer had broken most of the code. He was almost there. As he lay on the bed, he treated himself to the vision of tossing a shovel aside, swinging open a wooden chest, and plunging his fingers into the cold pile of sparkling jewels that constituted the lost Tavernier stones.
It wasn’t about the gemstones, he admonished himself; the only treasure to be sought and found was a solution to a famous crime. But what if the solver then kept the stones for himself? Would he be committing a crime as well?
He got out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror, and was startled by the camouflaged face looking back. Laughing out loud, he dampened a washcloth and wiped the makeup off. Then he flopped back down on the bed.
He checked his alarm clock for the twelfth time. Close your eyes, he told himself. Get some rest.
Give it one more hour. Let whomever is destined to find the stones have an opportunity to find the stones. Then—then—determine who is destined to take them home.
Zimmerman watched the Marktplatz from his hotel room window. He was sure David Freeman would pass by. But the hour grew late, and David had not appeared.
Had he already found the lost Tavernier stones?
Were the stones somewhere other than the church?
Was David sitting in his own room, waiting for someone else to lead the way?
Meanwhile, David, Sarah, and John had arrived at the bottom of the stone staircase. David pointed his flashlight down a sinuous, descending corridor. The corridor angled northward, penetrating deep into the mountain. John wondered how deep—to Hell itself? He thought, It’s now or never, just as David had said. See it through to the finish or turn back and quit.
“We don’t need these any longer,” David said, removing the red cellophane cover from his flashlight lens. John and Sarah removed theirs as well, and the corridor was suddenly awash in white light. Minute quartz crystals sparkled as the flashlight beams glided across the walls.
David led the way, brushing ancient cobwebs aside with his flashlight, stopping periodically to shine the light directly ahead and study the path before him. The ceiling was so low, John found he had to walk bent over double and sometimes in a squat. Age-old mosses and lichens, entombed since the last torch was extinguished in the corridor, made splotchy patterns on the rock surfaces. He brushed at a patch with his fingers and it came away like fine dust. As the corridor leveled off, he varied his strides to avoid shallow, murky puddles. Directly in front of him, Sarah was duck-walking in a hunkered crouch, her free hand frequently pressed against the floor to keep her balance.
Were he and David leading her into danger? Would this path suddenly disappear into some kind of an abyss? Was it possible there were witches still down there, waiting for them? He felt a chill and realized a breeze was flowing against them. Somehow the mountain was channeling cool, moist air through its secret corridor. The air had to come from somewhere; somewhere ahead, there was another opening.
The Tavernier Stones: A Novel Page 25